


The El Siete Chronicles

by Guede



Series: The Summer Movie Marathon [1]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, And A Lot Of Other Action Movies, Archaeology, Car Chases, Humor, Inspired by Indiana Jones, Kidnapping, Lunatic Archaeologist Pep, M/M, Mercenary Figo, Minor Character Death, Parody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 06:14:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4776668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep in the Pyrenees, a team of explorers has made a shocking discovery that could wipe out mankind if it falls into the wrong hands.  Naturally, it promptly does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The El Siete Chronicles

Cesc disgustedly pitched the pebble over his shoulder, then rocked back on his heels and squinted at the tiny crack before him. He’d been so hopeful when Bacary had turned up the pictographs yesterday night, but they’d been poking around this cave for the past three hours and hadn’t seen any further signs. It wasn’t looking good.

“Take it there’s nothing?” somebody said over Cesc’s left shoulder. When he turned around, Robin raised the lantern in his hand so it damn near blinded Cesc. Then the jerk just snorted it off. “You’re lucky I don’t take you outside and knock some sense into your head.”

“Huh?”

Robin blinked, then sighed. “Cesc? You threw a pebble behind you a moment ago.”

“So?”

“So where do you think I was a moment ago?” Robin asked pointedly. He lowered the lantern and scrubbed at his head; his hand left a dirty streak all the way across his forehead. “You know, maybe you should take a break. I think you’re getting tunnel vision.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot you all were back there.” It had been a while since Cesc had taken a break. He started to get up and then had to sit back down fast, because his leg muscles were numb. And then they weren’t, and damn it, cramped thighs and aching eyes for yet another crappy day of nothing. Sometimes he hated his job. “Man, I was so sure this would be it. All the pictographs matched and every—hey, are we sure about that? Because, you know, I might have tunnel vision but I at least can tell the difference between a smeared copy and a sun symbol.”

The side of Robin’s mouth quirked up, but then he ducked his head and coughed into his fist. His shoulder twitched back, reminding Cesc that Lassana was exploring a wall just a few meters away. “Well, you wanna check again, you can go right ahead. Everyone else is pretty much convinced it’s a dead end. I just went out and Wenger was already calling base camp about moving.”

“That’s fast,” Cesc muttered, looking back at the crack. Usually they gave a spot a day to prove itself. Then again, they were running out of funds. If they didn’t find something in the next three days, they’d have to close up shop and go home, and go back to scrambling around for grant money.

It just wasn’t fair. They’d been working on the El Siete legend for four years and they’d had so many promising leads, and not a single one had panned out. When Cesc had first gotten into Wenger’s group, all his friends had been mad jealous since Wenger had been fresh off the triumph of locating a lost Merovingian arsenal, but now they were all wrapping up their dissertations or getting fancy museum posts.

“Still better than dressing up in a suit and begging rich people for donations at fancy dinners,” Robin said, like he was reading Cesc’s mind.

“Yeah, but at least you have something in your display cases.” Cesc shoved his hands in his pockets, then took a deep breath and told himself to relax. They still had several days left, and this year they had more clues than ever. They had a chance.

Still, as he turned around, Cesc couldn’t help a kick at the ground. He swung his leg a little harder than he’d meant to and his heel swung all the way back into the wall, which abruptly gave. Caught off-balance, Cesc stumbled backwards and put his foot _through_ the rock floor. He shrieked and threw out his arms, trying to fling himself forwards.

There was an arcing flash, and then it was dark but somebody had grabbed Cesc’s arm. They yanked him up, paused, and then yanked him again so he nearly fell flat on his face. “Get up!” Robin shouted. “Get up and run!”

He jerked Cesc up by the waist as he yelled, then dragged Cesc along till Cesc could move on his own power. By then Cesc didn’t need the encouragement, since he could hear the rumbling of a cave-in right behind them. It was a natural cave and Almunia had said it was solid—some fucking geologist he was, Cesc thought—so they hadn’t put up supports. They just had to run for it.

Cesc suddenly remembered Lassana and slowed, but Robin shouted something, then waved his arm at the bright entrance ahead. A dark shadow moved across it: Lassana was already out. And rocks were clipping at Cesc’s heels. He put his head down and made a sprint for it.

They just made it out. Robin tripped over the threshold and had to be hauled to safety by Samir and Fran, and something smacked Cesc on the head, but when Cesc whipped around to look, he was well outside. He took a deep breath, then hissed and bent over to grab at his thighs, which were suddenly killing him. Then the huge crashing noises came in and he looked up to watch the rocks tumble down.

It was over in a couple minutes. Cesc barely had time to think about what a fucking way to make a point about his shitty day, and how now they didn’t even have the pictographs, and then the dust was starting to settle. He puffed out a breath and sat down on the ground. “This is such a fucking—”

“Cesc! You’re okay!” Theo came out of nowhere to grab Cesc and put him over on his back. Nice kid for sure, but he was going to break a rib if he didn’t let go. “Oh, my God! What happened?”

“I don’t know! I just…” Cesc looked up, over the lip of the cave “…just…just fucking did it! Holy Virgin Mary, look!”

He thrust out his arm and pointed at the cliff over the cave—or where it’d been. Part of it had collapsed to reveal a huge stone tower built into the real Cliffside, and carved all over it were signs of El Siete.

* * *

“I don’t think you get any more coffee,” Robin frowned. “You’re wired enough as it is.”

“I’ve been up since six! I _need_ that!” Cesc pushed away Robin’s arm and grabbed his cup from the tray Bacary was carrying around. Honestly, when Wenger was away Robin seriously turned into such a mother hen, and when Cesc was the one in temporary charge. “Hey! No, no! What are—” Cesc turned to Lassana “—what are those idiots doing? They’ve got to land over _there_. That’s where the landing pad is.”

Lassana looked blankly at Cesc, like those weren’t his buddies up in the helicopter. He only came to life when Cesc took off up the side of the mountain, trying to stop Cesc from going to warn the pilot. He knew his stuff and seemed like a nice guy, but sometimes Cesc really wondered if the man had been raised in a plastic bubble or something. He could be really weird.

Well, he’d only joined up for this season. He didn’t know them that well either, Cesc figured, and put it out of his mind. Cesc scrambled onto a high pile of rocks and then waved his arm over his head, trying to get the pilot’s attention. The helicopter turned and _should_ have seen him, but it still kept going higher up the mountain, away from the spot they’d cleared near the valley. Then it stopped so it was hovering right over the El Siete tower, which was glowing faintly from the flares they’d set around its base. It was the middle of the night and they’d told the pilot to use that to help navigate, so maybe he was just trying to confirm what it was. The guy wasn’t one of them, but belonged to their funding partner, just like Lassana.

Cesc turned around to yell down for a flashlight, so he could signal the helicopter, but something moved at the corner of his eye. He turned back and squinted, and…there was something long and thin hanging from the helicopter. A rope? Why would they throw a rope down? They couldn’t be trying to tether themselves to the tower; that’d wreck them.

There was a shout from lower down, sounding like Robin or Theo. Then there were more shouts, distracting Cesc from the helicopter. He looked down and saw a lot of dark figures moving quickly around. Then two moved into some lantern light and Cesc saw Lassana swing a shovel right into Robin’s side. Robin fell over and Lassana went over to him, then pointed something at him and started yelling towards the others.

Cesc whipped back around and found that now there were men shimmying down those ropes. The first one dropped into the eerie yellow flare light and Cesc recognized the face.

He didn’t need another clue to put it all together. He dropped his coffee, jumped off the rock-pile and, after an anguished glance back at his friends, took off into the woods. Behind him he could hear Lassana shouting up to the men at the tower about him, but he had a bit of a headstart. Also, they didn’t know the area, but he’d been up at six for the past three days because he’d been helping Wenger and Manu map the area.

The moment Cesc hit the trees, he turned downwards and right. The brush was thick and scratchy, even through his jeans and long-sleeves, and only sheer adrenaline kept him on his feet; he should’ve fallen about a dozen times but somehow managed to scrape enough ground to stay up.

Once Cesc figured he was about level with their tents, he twisted around and headed straight for them. He was hoping that the people chasing him would think he’d just run away from them. He would’ve liked to do that, but one, he knew he’d never make it on foot and two, he thought he’d heard the men at the tower yell something about making his friends help find him.

When he broke out into the open, Cesc was still alone. He could see the people at the cave above his head, so he knew they could see him if they looked. He tried to keep low and to the shadows as he made his way into the camp. The tents seemed empty but a few had lights on inside. He avoided those and ducked into the nearest darkened one. It turned out to be Bacary’s and he hadn’t left his phone, or any kind of communication device. At least not where Cesc could see and Cesc didn’t have time to rummage around. Biting his lip, Cesc moved onto the next tent.

There he struck gold: a mobile was lying right out on the bed. Cesc snatched it up and then scooted under the bed, as the shouting was starting to get closer. Between the dark and his nerves, he hit the wrong number at first. Then he got the number right, but the fucking phone didn’t have reception. Nearby someone got out of a tent and asked what the hell was going on, and Cesc didn’t recognize the voice; Cesc stifled his curse and shimmied to the far end of the bed, and then tried again, praying. This time the call went through.

But now it wasn’t getting picked up. It rang out three times and Cesc could taste blood on his lip now. The voicemail kicked in and Cesc ended the call, then redialed as fast as he could. No reception. He redialed again and the call went through, but now the people in the forest were telling whoever was in the camp to start searching the tents. Cesc squeezed the phone so hard that he felt it creak.

*…hello?* someone said in his ear.

“Professor!” Cesc cried out. Then he hissed and scrunched down; that’d been too loud. “Professor Guardiola, listen, it’s Cesc Fàbregas. Listen, I don’t have a lot of time—”

*Cesc? What on earth are you doing calling so—*

“I heard him over here!” someone outside said. They were only a couple meters away.

Cesc hissed again. “Listen to me! Listen, we found it but Lassana’s a spy and he must’ve told—”

The tent flaps snapped open and military boots tromped into view.

“—they’re taking over, they hit Robin with a shovel and I don’t know where Wenger is, and you have to stop them before they get into the tower!” Cesc said, no longer caring out loud he was. He twisted his face away just as somebody hahed in triumph by the side of the bed. They grabbed his foot and he screamed and kicked them hard somewhere. “We just found it! We’re not inside yet! It’ll take a week, it’s site thirty-six—get off me! Let go!”

*Cesc? Cesc! Who’s after you? Who is it? _Cesc_!*

“Let—you fucking—” Cesc clawed at the ground with his free hand as they hauled on both his legs. His fingernails gave one by one, and then the last two tore or something that hurt a lot and he started to slide out. “It’s M—”

Somebody hit him in the head.

* * *

Luís’ day started off with a fax. He picked it out of the machine and dropped it on the kitchen table, then finished up his morning routine. Then he grabbed the paper, tucked it into the newspaper waiting outside his hotel room, and headed to a nearby café for breakfast. He read the details of the job over his meal, mulled on them during a second coffee, and then went back to his room, where he called Deco. “A professor?”

Deco sighed. *Are you in or not? It’s a rush job so I need a yes or no.*

“Are you going to tell me anything before—”

*No. Yes or no.*

Sometimes Luís thought about how easily he could make that very, very naturalistic pained face of Deco’s into a genuine expression. “Yes, fine, I’m in. So a professor? I thought your boss was into higher education these days.”

*He is. He’s very interested in educating himself as to some knowledge the target possesses. We’ve already got a man in town who’ll help you. You’ll meet him at—*

“I hope it’s Rui Costa and not an Argentine.” Luís scanned the room, then stepped into the bathroom. Ah. He’d forgotten to pack his toothpaste again. He scooped that up and then went back into the bedroom area. His sole piece of luggage was on the bed. “Not that I have anything against Argentines, but your boss never gets any tall ones. And the target’s one-eighty. I hate carrying a tall person with someone who can’t hold up their end.”

Deco audibly smoothed out his breathing. *You’ll meet at an address that I’ll fax to you in a second and he’ll tell you the plan. You’re only there to assist. He’s the primary on this.*

What Luís hated about forgetting things wasn’t so much the possibility of leaving evidence behind as having to unpack and repack to get them in. And he’d done a really good job earlier of stowing his guns, too. “Is it Materazzi? He’s tall enough, but a little deficient in the escape skills.”

*I’m not going to tell you over the phone! Just go there and meet him, and find out yourself!* Deco finally snapped.

“Oh, for God’s sake. It’s not the hotel phone, it’s my own phone and it’s certified by the Chinese secret—”

Deco hung up. Typical: the little shit couldn’t take what he dished out. Rolling his eyes, Luís flipped his mobile shut and tucked it into his suit-jacket’s inner pocket. Then he finished putting away his toothpaste, repacked his bag, and took it off the bed just as the fax machine started up again. He read that one right away, then crumpled up both faxes into a long cigar-shaped tube. After opening a window, Luís lighted one end of the paper tube and then leaned out. He let the ashes float away on the breeze.

Then he shut the window and grabbed up his bag, and headed downstairs to see about getting a car.

* * *

The primary wasn’t an Argentine or Materazzi, but a new one Luís hadn’t met before. His name was Wesley, he had a Dutch accent and was, inevitably, on the short side. More importantly, he appeared to know how to do his job without making a fuss, which Luís had forgot to mention to Deco. He had an apartment prepped and ready, had his own guns, and had a reasonable plan for removing the target from a public building in broad daylight. The thought briefly occurred to Luís that Deco had finally seen the light with providing him with decent help.

Wesley frowned over the wheeled bin he was pushing. “What’s so funny?” he whispered.

“That I’ve gotten to my age and still can have pipe dreams,” Luís whispered back.

They were in the university library, a building of ancient stone and dusty books, and cut-eyed librarians. The look Wesley shot Luís was even more disapproving. It made Luís feel better: Deco was still doing his damnedest to irritate him, and failing miserably.

According to Wesley’s information, the target had set up an emergency appointment to look at some books that were normally kept in a restricted section. He should’ve been given a private, isolated room in which to do his research. The hallway certainly seemed absolutely deserted—there was a dust-bunny the size of a melon in one corner—and it was just far enough from their exit door that Luís felt a little concern. He paused long enough for Wesley to hiss at him to hurry up.

First they hit the security systems. Wesley spliced into the wires and uploaded fake images for the cameras, and did a few other whizzy things on his laptop. Then they hit the room, which as Wesley had said didn’t have any windows. He and Luís put on gas masks, and then Luis opened up a vial of sleeping gas and slid it under the door. They waited twenty seconds, heard a thump and went inside. The target was slumped over the table.

They cuffed his hands behind his back and tied a black cloth bag over his head. Wesley wanted to gag him as well, even though Luís had told him that the gas would last long enough. He was so insistent that Luís had to haul the target up and fold him into the bin before Wesley would give up, and thank God. If they wanted the target alive, there’d be no damn gag while he was unconscious; that way laid accidental suffocation and while they were paying Luís well, they weren’t paying him to dispose of the body.

Luís looked into the bin, then reached down and pushed at the target’s legs. They were long and kept making the cloth sides of the bin bulge in odd ways. He couldn’t figure out a way to fold them so they didn’t, so finally he gave in and let Wesley secure the cover.

For someone who seemed worried about getting caught, Wesley got inordinately curious after the target was in the bin. He began to look at the books on the table and even took out a notebook. A kick to the ankle got him moving, albeit with a glower that Luís ignored. Wesley might not mind having a gas mask on, but Luís wanted to get to the elevator so they could take those off. He hated the way those felt on his hair.

They got out of the building without a problem. Getting to the car was somewhat more complicated, since there was no hidden parking that was close enough, so they had to loiter around behind a bush till the lot was clear. But after that, it was the work of seconds to pop the trunk, lever the target in there and then pull away.

Twenty minutes to the apartment. It would’ve been fifteen but an accident slowed them up a little. Wesley locked his hands around the steering wheel and Luís watched him for signs of cracking up, but the other man relaxed after they passed the police cars. They drove the rest of the way without incident and then got the target up the back stairs unseen. After a look at Wesley, Luís told the other man to get the bags and carried up the target by himself. He should’ve just remembered the height issue and never worried about Deco. For someone who acted like he had invented the idea of suffering, Deco was a remarkably petty little bastard.

The apartment was a one-bedroom, the only occupied one in the building, which was scheduled to undergo renovations in two weeks. All the furniture had been removed except for two beds, a desk with a computer connection and a fridge. One bed was little more than a mattress on the floor, but the other one had a metal frame; Luís lowered the target onto that one. By then the target was sluggishly twitching. Luís checked the pulse in the neck, decided it was fine and then went to get something to secure the target’s feet to the footboard.

He found Wesley at the desk, talking away on the phone. “…looking at old maps of the area, from the 1500s. I wrote down some of the titles—hang on.” Wesley put his hand over the mouthpiece and looked up. “Yes?”

“The other set of manacles?” Luís said. “He’s waking up.”

“Oh. They’re in my duffel, in the blue case.” Then Wesley turned back to the phone. He rattled off some titles before noticing that Luís hadn’t left. “What?”

Luís had been wondering when he’d find the real problem with this one. “He’s waking up.”

“I heard you. I’ll talk with him in a half-hour or so. Right now I’m busy,” Wesley said, a warning tone in his voice.

“Do you want me to put him back to sleep?” Luís asked very nicely.

Wesley opened his mouth, paused, and then shut his mouth. He frowned. “Er…I don’t know. Wait a minute and I’ll check with the boss.”

As Wesley turned back to the phone, Luís stuffed the manacles into his pocket and headed for the bedroom. The man didn’t know and he’d check with the boss, he repeated in his head. Jesus Christ Our Savior, but some days Luís thought they’d stopped making them competent with his generation.

When Luís got to the bedroom, the target didn’t look right. The hood was still on his head but his head was bent towards his knees so Luís couldn’t see his hands.

“I think I’ll just stay here and shoot you,” Luís said from the doorway. “If you cry out, then I’ll know you were awake.”

The target moved a little. Then his shoulders moved in a sigh. He lifted his head—which slid right out of the hood—and pushed himself up on his hands, which were still cuffed but now in front of him. Highly flexible, Luís noted. And now he knew what Luís looked like, but Luís didn’t spend too much time cursing that slip; it’d happened before and he knew how to deal with it. 

“All right,” the target said in a resigned tone. He slid his hands forward a little more. “I don’t want any violence if there doesn’t has to be any.”

“That’s a very sensible thing to say, and I am in complete agreement.” Luís came forward, one eye on the target, and checked the cuffs. They were fine.

“I agree with your taste in poetry too,” the target said suddenly, and then followed up by quoting a familiar-sounding line in Catalan.

Luís looked up and found the target staring hard at his right hand, and then he remembered there’d been someone reading Catalan poetry at the bar he’d gone to the night before. The entry stamp must not have washed completely off his hand; at the time he’d thought it was harmlessly silly, a sign of trying too hard to attract a younger crowd, but now he cursed that damn bouncer.

And he’d taken his eye off the target, who launched himself right at Luís. If the drugs hadn’t slowed up the man’s movements, he could have easily taken Luís. As it was, Luís barely managed to keep his feet against the other man’s weight. Then he pivoted and shoved the man back onto the bed, climbing haphazardly on top. He grabbed at the man’s hands, missed but got the chain, and pinned that to the mattress. The man jabbed his knee into Luís’ thigh and Luís slipped, falling onto the man’s chest so they nearly cracked heads. He suppressed a grunt and got his other hand up onto the man’s neck. Where the hell was Wesley? They were making enough noise.

Wesley didn’t show. The target kissed Luís, who had to admit that that was a new one.

Luís got his head up and moved so his forearm was across the target’s throat. He could cut off the man’s air supply faster that way. “Well. I didn’t think the poems were that risqué.”

“But they were good, weren’t they?” the target said, panting a little. He was a handsome man, with particularly striking eyes: large, dark and deep. They also looked slightly crazed at the moment. “Look, you don’t like violence, I don’t like violence. I realize you’re probably planning to use some on me, but I really think we could work out a different kind of dialogue.”

“You _are_ an academic.” Luís started thinking about ways to shift his weight so he could safely get the manacles on the target’s feet.

The target put his head down on the bed and sighed, as if they were actually having this argument. “It doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere, and you can stop whenever you want. There’s really no risk to you in trying something else. This doesn’t have to be as unpleasant as it is.”

For a few seconds Luís studied the man’s face. “I don’t rape people.”

“I’m consenting,” the man said. That glint in his eyes wasn’t normal desperation. His manner was far too possessed for that, and yet he was saying very insane things.

“You’re consenting,” Luís repeated. He moved his arm without thinking, then realized he’d taken it off the man’s neck. After a moment’s thought, he left it off. “I’m not a lawyer, but I think anybody would argue you’re under duress no matter what you say.”

The target wrinkled his brow. “But consider that—”

“Look, we’re not discussing this. Hold still and don’t make me—”

“Increase the duress I’m under?” the man muttered, more than a little sarcastically. He shifted around under Luís. “You’re already about to pop my arm out of my shoulder.”

Actually doing that would just play to him, Luís reluctantly thought. Then he grimaced at himself, because they were _not_ having this argument. He lifted the man’s wrists to the man’s chest, then held them there while he got the manacles out of his pocket.

In the other room, Wesley finally made a noise. Both Luís and the target froze, but Wesley still didn’t come in. Luís revised his opinion of Wesley in the downward direction.

“There’s someone else?” the target asked. He looked at Luís. “But I’m talking to you. I’d rather talk to you.”

“No, you don’t,” Luís muttered, when the sensible response would have been to tell the target he didn’t know—actually, the best response would’ve been silence. Fifty of these jobs and Luís should have had it down pat by now. He was starting to lose his temper.

The target looked downright mulish. “Yes, I would.”

“No, you—look, I’m not an amateur and this is not a movie and you’re not going to seduce me in fifteen minutes, all right?” Luís snapped, grabbing the target by the neck.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Wesley from the doorway.

Luís told himself not to get angry, then looked over. He noted Wesley’s tense posture and mentally cursed Deco again. “I’m trying to secure him to the bed.”

“For what?” Then Wesley rolled his eyes. “Look, I don’t know what you thought this was going to be, but you can’t—”

“I _wasn’t_ ,” Luís snarled. “If you think for one second that I’d do that, you and I are stepping outside.”

Wesley laughed, half-nervous and half-disdainful. “Right. Now look, you’re just here to assist, not to have fun. So—”

“I was _not_ —”

“Just fucking shut up, you fucking asshole, and—”

There was a glimpse of Wesley’s eyes going flat and then the other man’s hand moved towards the gun in his belt. Luís let go of the target’s neck and rolled off while grabbing the knife strapped to his ankle. He flung it and Wesley’s shot went into the wall over the bed, giving Luís time to get his gun.

“I’m going to kill Deco,” Luís said a moment later, surveying the damage. At least he’d been paid half upfront.

“Who?”

Back on the bed, the target was sitting up and looking a bit pale, but otherwise in good shape for an academic confronting gritty reality. He rubbed around his handcuffs and glanced at Luís, then went back to staring at Wesley.

“I’m Pep, by the way,” he said off-handedly.

“I know.” Luís considered the facts: Wesley had done a good job locating and prepping the apartment, and apparently he’d just called to check in with Deco. Then Luís went and sat down on the bed. He had a few minutes to think about what the hell he was going to do—

—after a last, decidedly unacademic swipe of the tongue over Luís’ lower lip, Pep sat back and looked at the gun Luís was shoving into his rib. “My area of expertise isn’t law either, but I don’t believe it’s duress if you’re trying to use force to prevent me from doing it.”

“What are you doing?” Luís said.

Pep looked like he wanted to sigh but instead he tugged at his shirt-collar. “I know you didn’t do that for me,” he said, pointing his shoulder at Wesley. “That wasn’t for that. That was because I would honestly like to see you in a more social setting. But obviously we’ve got some problems to deal with first. I think you’re out of a job, and maybe in some trouble, but I’m quite sure you didn’t just take me out of danger. Also I’m in a hurry.”

“Just what is your field?” Luís asked.

“Archaeology. I specialize in early Spanish history, particularly the Catalan region,” Pep said.

Luís nodded. “Anything to do with why somebody would pay to have you snatched?”

“Very likely.” That glint was back in Pep’s eyes.

“All right. Let’s go somewhere more… _social_ …and talk about that,” Luís said, getting up. He got Pep by the arm and took the man around with him, checking for any obvious signs.

Luckily, they’d been using only Wesley’s things, so Luís hadn’t even unpacked. He only had to get his knife back—Pep blanched but then got curious about how Luís was cleaning it in the sink and what solution Luís was using to do that—and then his bag. And Wesley’s laptop. Then he locked the apartment door and led them down the back way to his car.

Once they were in the car, Pep poked Luís in the arm and then showed his cuffed wrists. “Can you take these off?”

“I thought you were in a hurry,” Luís said.

“Not that much—”

“No. And don’t argue with me or else you’ll be even later to whatever it is. I need to drive,” Luís said sharply. “And I can shoot you. Nobody’s paying me to not do that now.”

Pep stiffened and stared at Luís in silence for a while. Then he suddenly shrugged and sat back. He started looking at the view; Luís almost asked but just in time caught himself, and instead started making phone calls.

* * *

“Oh, I like this one too.” The big German asshole put down a really nasty-looking dental implement with spikes and shiny edges on the table. He regarded it a moment, then reached out and twitched it so it was lying at a slightly different angle.

Cesc rolled his eyes. “It looks just as shiny as it did before you moved it.”

The German guy narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils and Cesc couldn’t help flinching. He was tied to a chair and his head was still achy, and the asshole trying to scare him was, well, huge. Built like a fucking bull, as Robin would’ve said.

“You’re very brave right now. You were very brave when you admitted you’re the one who’s studied the maps the most, and spared your friends the trouble of sitting here with me,” the German went on after a moment. He’d calmed down and was playing with his dental tools again, leaning over so his shadow covered Cesc. “But I think you should ask yourself if being brave is really what is the best thing for you.”

“Okay,” Cesc quietly. He fidgeted in the chair, digging his toe into the ground as much as the ropes would allow.

The other man gave him a couple minutes. In the meantime, the asshole hummed some weird German song to himself while running his fingers up and down those tools. It was…well, not that Cesc should expect normal behavior in this kind of situation, but it was kind of disturbingly sexual. It reminded Cesc a lot of a truly freaky—yet absolutely hilarious—videoclip Sergio had sent the mailing list earlier in the week and Cesc giggled. Then he noticed the German guy glaring at him and hastily tried to sober up. “I was thinking! Really!”

From the look on his face, the German guy believed that as much as those damn meter people did when they dinged Cesc for double-parking. “You tell us how to get into that tower or we’ll hurt you,” he said, looming over Cesc. He poked Cesc in the chest with his finger. “A lot.”

“Yeah? Okay.” Cesc chewed his lip. “Um, I mean, I’m not done thinking about it yet. I…can I go to the toilet?”

German guy leaned down so close Cesc could smell his last meal. It hadn’t been tasty. “No.”

“But I really need to! If I don’t get to, I’m gonna do it right here, and then you’re going to have to smell it while you’re hurting me or whatever, and that’s not going to be fun for you,” Cesc pointed out.

“Tell me and I’ll let you go,” German guy said. He sounded like he was gritting his teeth. His lips peeled back a little and with all that dental fondling, Cesc had to look, and the guy did have a nice set. Really big and white. “Or else you can just sit in your own—”

“That’s so _gross_.” Cesc made a face. “Oh, my God, you guys have a helicopter but you can’t take care of basic sanitation?”

“I’m not here to—” The man stopped. He looked to the side and muttered something to himself, and then turned back to Cesc. His face was a little more composed. “Are you going to cooperate by yourself?”

After another moment, Cesc slumped in the chair and nodded.

“Good. That’s a good decision.” The German asshole stood up and went around the table. He gave his shiny things a last creepy look, then started putting them back in their case. “You shouldn’t feel ashamed. Nobody wants to be hurt. And nobody has to get hurt here.”

“I don’t know,” Cesc said.

German guy stiffened. He rolled his eyes up a little, the same way Cesc’s parents sometimes did when counting to ten. Then he shook himself and shot Cesc a dirty look. He reached into the case to take out a tool. “That’s a very bad—”

“Look, I don’t, okay? I’m cooperating. I’m telling you what I know, and that doesn’t include how to get into that tower. Those maps just show where the thing is, not what to do once you find it. I mean, you’ve got the maps so can’t you look at them? You can read a map, can’t you?” Cesc sighed.

For such a big guy, the German was really fast. One moment he was at the other end of the table and the next he was in Cesc’s face and holy God, he’d actually lifted the whole goddamn chair. He had Cesc by the arms and he was yelling something in German and whatever, and _God_ his breath smelled bad. At first Cesc just tried to turn his head out of the way, but the German kept getting in his face and finally Cesc hauled back and spat in the man’s face.

The chair went down with a clatter. It bounced around, throwing Cesc painfully against the ropes holding him to it, and for a moment he thought it was going to tip over. But it finally settled on all four legs and he let out a huge sigh of relief. If he got any more bruised, he wasn’t even going to be able to take a piss.

Then Cesc looked up and the German guy was staring at him while slowly wiping the spit off his face. It made Cesc’s skin crawl and suddenly he couldn’t think of any way to cover up the fact that he was really fucking terrified. “Are you going to stick those in my mouth?” he babbled. He heard himself getting louder and shriller but somehow couldn’t shut up. “I don’t want them in my mouth! Don’t touch my teeth! You asshole, you’re so fucking messed up, you’re not a fucking dentist don’t do it don’t don’t don’t—”

The door opened. It finally broke Cesc out of it and he gasped for air, while the German, who’d just kept staring at him, turned around. “What?” he said.

“What the hell are you doing?” Deco said. He frowned around the room, then spotted the dental tools and heaved a huge sigh. “This again? What did the boss say? We need them to talk, so don’t mess with their mouths because of course, _then they can’t talk_.”

The German looked vaguely insulted. “I don’t even know how to use them. I borrowed them from the doc. They’re just for the effect.”

“What effect?” Cesc squeaked; he was still short of air. “Making me hyperventilate?”

Deco wrinkled up his face and ran one hair despairingly through his hair a couple times. “Ballack, did you even get anywhere, or did you just scare him into a panic? Because then they don’t really say anything useful.”

Ballack shoved the tools across the table, not even looking when a couple clattered onto the floor. He crossed his arms and pulled himself up to his full height, and gave Deco the same slow, deadly stare he’d just aimed at Cesc. “He said they just knew how to find the place, and that we could see that from the maps. I thought you said they knew how to get in.”

“They do,” Deco said.

“Do not!” Cesc said.

Deco blinked, then looked at Cesc the same way certain headmasters had looked at Cesc when he’d been younger. “Yes, you do.”

“No, I _don’t_ ,” Cesc snapped. “We’ve got maps and we’ve got some old texts, but haven’t you idiots even looked at them? They’re all like, ‘and the tower of El Siete was hewn out of the cliffs, and the men of El Siete put the stuff in and added some traps and sealed it up real good, so nobody can find it.’ This is archaeology! Nobody just gives you directions! I mean, if that was true, the dissertations would be a hell of a lot shorter.”

“I have it on good authority that you know how to get in and you had a plan and everything,” Deco said stubbornly. “We saw that there’s a folder on it.”

“A—oh, that’s just the excavation plan. You really don’t read anything.” Cesc had to say, he was getting less impressed with them by the second. They were really good about coming in and beating everyone up, but that seemed to be about it. “Yeah, we have that. Archaeologists? We don’t know how to get in, but that’s not really the point. The point is to document it properly, so first you do a survey and map out where things are, and then you make a grid, and _then_ you start digging and maybe worrying about finding an entry or something, but that was probably going to be the second dig season anyway because you need engineers for that and we don’t really have a good one—well, there’s Almunia but he said the cave wasn’t going to fall in and we all know how _that_ went—”

Five minutes later, Cesc was awkwardly peeling Theo off him. He assured the other man that he was fine, or at least hadn’t gotten hurt from the hug, but that his bruises and rope burns could kind of do without that stuff right now.

“Which one did you get?” Robin asked.

“Two Portuguese, this really cranky Argentine, and this German guy named Ballack,” Cesc said, rubbing at his ass. They really hadn’t needed to throw him in like that; he’d been so stiff from cramps that it wasn’t like he could have run. “I kept pointing out to them that we don’t know anything and they kept getting frustrated and sending in new people. You?”

Robin grinned weakly. “Just their doc and that Ballack guy. They say my side’s okay, just bruised. Poked that a hell of a lot more than they needed to, but I’m okay. Other than that, pretty much went the same way as you.”

“Oh. That’s good.” Cesc looked around the room they were in, then suppressed the urge to be depressed. Yeah, it was a metal prefab and was chilly and ugly, but it could be worse. “Nice of them. I guess they must really not have the boss if they’re bothering to worry about us.”

Manu raised his hand. “I heard one of them say he got away and ran into the woods. They’re putting up a guard on camp but they aren’t looking for him. Deco called him a stuffy bookworm and said he’d probably die of exposure.”

A titter went around the room: they’d all been on enough digs with Wenger to know how stupid that was. He might dress sharp, but that was because he was French. Anyway, Cesc wasn’t too worried about the boss so long as he hadn’t been caught. Wenger hadn’t racked up his reputation by staying home and not learning how to get his hands dirty. And as long as Wenger was free, Cesc and his friends probably didn’t have to worry too much either. Even if they didn’t know how to get into the tower, they were still the ones who knew how to use the tools and to start about figuring that out. It was pretty clear that all the idiots guarding them didn’t know a thing about digging into ancient structures. They’d been knocked around some, but so far it hadn’t any worse than what they’d get anyway on a dig.

“Did they ask you about Guardiola?” Robin asked.

Cesc felt the smile slip off his face. He crawled over to a wall so he could lean against it, then worked his knees up to his chest and hugged them. “No. I’m pretty sure that that means they think they don’t have to worry about him.”

“You think they sent somebody after him?” Fran said, shivering.

“Yeah,” Cesc said after a moment. He saw the way everyone was staring at him and tried to look more confident. “But trust me, they’re gonna have to worry about him.”

* * *

“This is a new one,” Zinedine said, taking the armchair. He took a moment to smooth down his shirt, then looked them carefully over.

As much as Luís loved the man, sometimes he wished Zinedine had more modes than languid and enraged. But Luís was currently depending on Zinedine’s many, many good points, and so he just resettled himself on the couch. He glanced at Pep, who was still sitting there with his cuffed hands resting easily in his lap and gazing around with a mildly interested expression. Then he looked at Zinedine.

“Patrick is looking into the flat and that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m also trying to get hold of Ludo, but he’s not answering.” Zinedine shrugged. “Not your problem. But I can’t do anything about—”

“I know that’s my problem. I just want to know if you can find where he is right now, and see if he’d figured out there’s a problem over here,” Luís said. He shifted again and then told himself to stop working up his nerves. He’d been in tight spots before and had gotten out of them, and this was by no means the tightest one. If he kept his head and called in the right favors, he’d be fine. “How long will that take?”

Zinedine did some mental calculations. “Let me go see. If I can’t do it in an hour, I’ll let you know and I’ll get my people on it. In the meantime, you’re fine here and you can stay, no problem.”

“All right. Thanks, I—wait a moment, I almost forgot.” Luís bent to the bag at his feet and got out Wesley’s laptop. He handed that over to Zinedine. “It’ll probably help to check into this.”

The other man nodded and put the laptop under his arm. Then he got up, saying something about making a couple calls before they had lunch. He went out of the room and Pep turned his head to watch, then twisted back to face Luís. “I had no idea mercenaries had such good taste in antiques. That is a real—”

“Probably, but look, why the hell did somebody pay me to kidnap you?” Luís interrupted.

Pep paused. He blinked a few times, then rearranged his arms. One of his sleeves bunched up around the elbow and he pulled on his suit-jacket to straighten it out. “Are you keeping me alive because your last resort is to bargain me in exchange for no retaliation?”

“Well, that’s very direct,” Luís managed after a moment. He caught himself looking for Zinedine and grimaced at the slip. “I don’t know what you know about mercenaries, but—”

“Nothing at all, but I have people’s lives depending on me, so I really cannot afford to waste any time. I’m really very sorry for the trouble you seem to be in, but if you’re not going to help me get to where I need to go, I can’t help you,” Pep said calmly.

“Then what was that about the antiques a moment ago?”

A few furrows appeared in Pep’s brow. He started to fidget his fingers, though he didn’t seem aware of it. “Conversational manners. Being in a hurry isn’t the same thing as being rude. Look, are you going to help me?”

“I don’t even know what this is about, so I can’t exactly make a decision,” Luís snapped. Then he made himself take a few deep breaths and face up to the obvious: something about this man had gotten under his skin and was still under his skin. It happened. He might be highly experienced and so should’ve been less likely to have it happen to him, but it happened. He could deal with it.

“Some of my colleagues were on a dig in the Pyrenees and they made a very important discovery, only to be taken prisoner by the same man who paid you. I’ve got about a week to rescue them but I’d really rather do it earlier than that,” Pep said. He glanced down at his hands, then back up before Luís could look away. A little emotion leaked into his voice. “They’re in serious danger and I’m the only one who knows about them right now. I need to help them.”

Rui Costa, Luís decided, was going to laugh himself to death, and then insist that they watch the Indiana Jones movies again. “Archaeologists?”

“Yes.” Pep scooted a little closer, and when Luís was looking down at him doing that, grabbed Luís’ arm. He yanked Luís forward so they bashed heads; Luís flinched but Pep didn’t. Nor did Pep seem to notice that Luís had instinctively grabbed his throat again. “If I don’t help them, not only will they possibly lose their lives, but a great discovery could fall into the wrong hands and endanger—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, what’s this about? What’d they find?” Luís snapped, trying to shove Pep back.

“El Siete,” Pep rasped, choking a bit. He wrenched his head a couple times, then suddenly threw himself at Luís. But this time he wasn’t aiming for Luís’ mouth, which threw Luís enough so that Pep got a double fistful of Luís’ shirt. He started shaking Luís in time to his words, his voice rising with urgency. “Do you understand? If it’s used for the wrong reason, do you know how terrible that’d be? It can’t happen. _It can’t happen_ , and I’m _not_ going to let it, and I need to get to the mountains and get to Cesc and—”

Luís’ teeth were rattling in his head. At first he’d tried to push off Pep gently, but once the man had a handhold, he held onto it like a starving dog onto a bone. His fingernails actually started to scrape through Luís’ shirt. Then Luís tried squeezing Pep’s throat, but Pep jerked his leg up and around—still yelling and shaking Luís like mad—and his knee slammed dangerously high up on Luís’ knee. Reflex made Luís hop back.

Pep’s iron hold meant Luís took the man with him. The weight sent Luís off-balance and suddenly he was sprawled on his back, trying desperately to fend off Pep by the neck while the man laid on top and screamed at him. Goddamn it, Luís thought, he was _not_ this bad.

He forced his other arm under Pep’s belly and was about to lever up on it when there was a ripping sound. Pep jerked up and then fell half-onto Luís, his wide eyes testifying that he was as surprised as Luís. He gasped, coughed, and started to slip off; Luís pulled his arm out and then wrapped it around Pep’s waist, dragging him back. Then Luís actually thought about what he was doing.

“Luís?” Zinedine asked.

After a moment, Luís brought himself to turn his head. Zinedine was standing by the armchair, gun in hand but lowered, a quizzical expression on his face.

“I’m all right,” Luís said. “We’re…discussing something. The problem.”

Zinedine being Zinedine, he refrained from the amused comment and just telegraphed it with his brows, which was more maddening since it didn’t give Luís any opportunity to respond. “Is it lunch for three then?”

“Ah.” Luís glanced at Pep, who was still trying to clear his throat. Then he sighed and nodded. “Thank you.”

“I’ll go get that started,” Zinedine said. He half-turned, looked back and swept his gaze up and down the couch, and then went out of the room.

Pep coughed again. When Luís looked at him, he was rubbing his mouth with the scraps he’d torn from Luís’ shirt. Then he tossed them aside and folded his arms on Luís’ chest. “You know, I really would like to discuss this rationally—I usually prefer to do things that way—but you have to understand that—”

“You’re in a hurry. Lives are at stake. That damn myth isn’t a myth.” Luís caught the flicker of Pep’s brows upward and raised his own brows. “Look, if someone’s willing to pay me over it, it’s real. Real enough to give me problems, and if that isn’t reality, I don’t know what is.”

Blink, tuck chin into chest, think it over, look relieved. Then Pep firmed up his expression again. He also got his hands into Luís’ shirt again, and one layer closer to Luís’ skin as some of his fingers went through the rips. “I can’t pay you. But if you help me, you do an awful lot towards fixing your own problem for good. And you’ll help save innocent lives, and even if you don’t care about that, you should care about keeping the world intact as it is, or else there’s no point to all that money you’ve probably earned because—”

“All right, all right,” Luís sighed.

“—it’ll be no good if you can’t spend it on the things you like—”

Luís opened his mouth. Then he decided that that hadn’t a chance in hell in working, and instead grabbed Pep by the waist and the thigh. He breathed in, then jerked himself up and swung Pep around at the same time so the man was sitting on his lap. Then he grinned at Pep’s startled expression. “Like a replacement shirt? I get the point—I’ll help. You can stop trying to persuade me.”

After another moment’s gaping, Pep relaxed and smiled himself. He patted Luís’ chest through the rips. “Thank you. You have no idea how grateful I am, but I’ll do whatever I can to help you out once this is all settled.”

“Never mind that, worry about getting out of this first,” Luís said. He put his hands down on the couch.

Pep didn’t move. He kept looking happily at Luís, his eyes glowing with an almost childish brightness. If he really had been at that bar last night, it was a shame he hadn’t introduced himself, Luís admitted. Then Luís put that out of his head and turned to the matter at hand.

“You can stop that now,” he said, nodding at Pep’s hands, which were still inside his shirt. The other man frowned and Luís sighed. He did mean to help out, if only because it would be the most efficient way to cover his own back, but he had to admit he wasn’t looking forward to working with an amateur. And a very…unearthly one at that. “Look, I said yes, no need to keep trying to sweeten me up. Which you’re not that good at anyway.”

Understanding dawned in Pep’s eyes. He took his hands out of Luís’ shirt, muttering an apology about the tear, and reached over like he was going to climb off. Then he abruptly turned back, holding up his wrists. “Do these come off yet? I’m hardly going to run now.”

“Why not? You could head for the police and avoid having to deal with me completely,” Luís said.

“Because I’m in a hurry and the police would be too slow, and also they wouldn’t believe me about El Siete,” Pep explained. He looked at Luís again over his cuffs.

Luís mulled it over and then admitted that the man had a point, and it was also consistent with Pep’s past behavior. At any rate, even if Pep ran off, Luís would probably still end up helping the man. It sounded like Pep had been targeted to keep him out of the way, not to get anything from him, so handing him over late wouldn’t be worth enough to make up for Wesley. And it was too late to make up some story about Pep getting Wesley. The cuffs weren’t doing much to keep Pep from making trouble anyway.

“If it’s because you just like it that way, then I’d think it could wait,” Pep added, just as Luís was about to reach for the cuffs.

“I think it’d help if you stopped making suggestions,” Luís said, irritated.

Pep lowered his hands a little and looked at Luís. “Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my suggestions so much as that you don’t seem to respond as quickly to ordinary dialogue.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my responses. I just don’t like being pressured,” Luís said.

“So it’s just one way with you?” Brows raised, Pep leaned in a bit to peer at Luís’ face. “Narrow-minded of you.”

“I’m _very_ broadminded,” Luís snapped.

Someone cleared their throat and it wasn’t Luís or Pep. Luís stiffened; Pep jerked back, then dropped his gaze and mumbled to himself. Over his head, Luís could see Zinedine watching amusedly.

“Lunch in the kitchen,” Zinedine said, and then the man ambled away.

“Sorry,” Pep muttered. When Luís looked back at him, he still had his head down and was rubbing at his temple with his knuckles. He looked a little flushed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…your character’s not the issue here.”

For some reason Luís wanted to contradict him. And also do other things, and Luís just closed his eyes and counted to five. Then he opened them, bent around Pep and hooked up his bag. At that point Pep got off, but Luís caught the man by the arm before Pep could go any farther. Pep started to ask a question, then fell silent.

Luís found his lockpicks, then set to work on the cuffs. They were off in a few seconds and both of them were standing awkwardly by the couch. Finally Luís pointed at Pep’s wrists, which Pep was massaging nervously.

“You should get some ice for that from the freezer,” he said. “We’ll eat and figure out how we’re getting to the Pyrenees.”

Pep nodded. He waited for Luís, started a little when Luís gestured for him to go first, and then went. After a few steps he turned back. “I need to call you something. Do you have…I don’t know what you use, a nickname or—”

“Luís,” Luís said. “It’s my name. At this point I don’t see the point in giving you a fake one.”

“Oh. Well, thank you,” Pep replied, hesitating a little. They went a few more steps. “Luís?”

“Yes?”

“Do you actually know what I mean by El Siete? Or do you just know it’s a myth? Because the details are probably going to be important, and if you aren’t familiar with it—”

Luís sighed. “Save it for lunch.”

* * *

Their midday meal was water and military ration bars that tasted like cardboard mixed with rotten meat, and when Cesc knew they’d had plenty of decent food left at camp. Those assholes were even taking their supplies.

“So what’s Guardiola going to do?” Robin asked. Then he paused, looking odd. He put his thumb and forefinger into his mouth, twisted them around a few times and pulled out something that he flicked away. “Don’t even look at that. I don’t even want to know what that was.”

“Too late,” muttered Nicklas in the corner.

Cesc shrugged and swigged some water, which at least was bottled. It didn’t do much to take out the bad taste of the ration bars, but it at least didn’t make it any worse. “Come find us? But he can’t do that right away. I only had time to tell him which site number it is, so he’s gonna have to get to Cruyff’s office or maybe check the project records to figure that out.”

“Are the police going to believe him?” Bacary asked.

Nicklas abruptly gave up on his ration bar and tossed it aside, then stood up. His arm bumped Bacary in the back of the head, but he muttered an apology without even looking at Bacary. If he started being a dick right now, Cesc was going to call in that German guy and tell him Nicklas knew everything. They just really didn’t need it.

“I mean, it is supposed to be a myth. When I told my grandma what I was doing, she looked at me for a while and then she said if I was joking, that wasn’t very nice considering how hard the family had worked to support me through school,” Bacary added. He looked morosely at his water. “Maybe Wenger’ll make it back to that village and call for help.”

“The nearest one’s a day and a half away by car. The boss is good but not that good. I think Guardiola’s gonna be faster.” To be honest, Cesc was about ready to give up on his bar too. The thing was so hard that chewing it felt like chewing through concrete, and Cesc already ached in enough places without adding his jaw to the list. “I don’t know if he’s going to get the police.”

Robin sat up. “He’s not? Then what the hell—he can’t just come up here by himself! You told him there were men with guns, didn’t you?”

“Well, they knocked me out while I was on the phone with him, so I think he’s got a clue. He’s not stupid. He’ll get something that works. Maybe it won’t be the police, but whatever it is, it’ll be fine,” Cesc said. He gulped down his current mouthful, looked at the bar and then started wrapping it back up. Stomach pains were easier to deal with than this crap. “I mean, you remember about the thing in Argentina with Lionel? He blackmailed the hell out of them and got Lionel back, and even got that dumb plaque out of it.”

Over to the side, Nicklas put his hands up on the one tiny window they had and pushed against it, stretching out his arms. The Plexiglas groaned and creaked annoyingly loud, but Nicklas just kept stretching despite all their dirty looks.

Samir held up his hand. “I thought they were exaggerating about the blackmail. What, the Olympics flame thing was for real?”

Cesc nodded and Samir’s eyes widened. On the other hand, Robin still looked a little doubtful. “That still didn’t involve guns,” Robin said. “Look, I’m not saying it’s not awesome we’ve got Guardiola looking for us, but I’m just wondering if we should just sit around and wait.”

“Hey, well, nobody said we have to do that. It’s just that we’re locked in here and all those assholes are assholes with guns,” Cesc replied, a bit irked. It wasn’t like he liked it any more than they did, but he was trying to make sure they all got out okay. The assholes weren’t great archaeologists, but he and his friends weren’t exactly trained to be assholes with guns. “You wanna break out, let me know how and we can get on that. But I just can’t see any way right now.”

Nicklas cleared his throat. “I think I just popped part of the window.”

* * *

“So what you know is that there’s a bunch of students and one professor being held by an unknown number of armed men up in the mountains, at some site that—”

“I know which site,” Pep interrupted Luís. “As soon as I can get my hands on their dig plans, I can get an exact location.”

Zinedine came back around that point and offered around a bowl of mixed fruit for dessert. When nobody took him up on it, he shrugged and spooned himself a nice mound.

Luís sighed and conceded the point. “All right, so you need to go back to the university, I suppose. But do you know the general location where they are? At least close enough to pick an airport?”

Pep put down his fork. “You’re booking flight tickets already?”

“I thought you were in a hurry.”

“I am! But like you said, it’s a delicate situation and while I’m sure you’re very good at what you do, I don’t think that three people will be enough,” Pep said, managing to flatter and question Luís’ judgment in one go. He pushed his dish to the side and turned in his chair, his one arm sliding across the table so if Luís tried to look away from Pep’s animated face, all he saw was Pep’s equally animated hand-gestures. “The official authorities aren’t going to be persuaded in time but—”

“I know, and we’re not using them and there’s going to be more than three people. Which is why Zinedine needs to know the airport now so he can make sure we have seats.” Luís had one last mouthful of his rice before abandoning his own plate. He wiped his mouth on his napkin, then nodded at Zinedine. “He’s not coming, by the way.”

Pep frowned. “He’s not? But that’s one less person.”

“It’s not,” Zinedine said. He savored a piece of mango, then drank some water. Then he looked up at Luís. “Keep Ludo in town, I think. You want anybody else?”

“Raúl, but that’s the only one you need to worry about. I’ll use my contacts for the rest,” Luís said, and then he turned to Pep. He made a little nod and hand-wave towards Zinedine.

After a moment, Pep gave up the airport. He let Zinedine and Luís chat a bit about travel arrangements, and then Zinedine got up with his plate and went into the kitchen, and Pep grabbed Luís’ left thigh just above the knee. While Luís was staring at that, Pep got right up into Luís’ breathing space again. “Just what kind of people are your contacts? Are they going to understand how important this is? And you understand that this isn’t just about El Siete, don’t you? It’s important, but also important is freeing my—”

“I know, I know, they’re all very competent,” Luís snapped. He realized he’d shoved himself back in his chair and straightened up, then pushed at Pep’s arm. The other man didn’t move, but instead just kept staring intensely into Luís’ eyes. It really wasn’t an act, Luís thought. “Look, you’re the professor, you take care of the archaeology things like figuring out the site, and I’ll take care of the things like blunt force trauma, all right?”

“Oh. All right.” Pep relaxed his stance but didn’t let go of Luís’ leg. In fact he seemed to have forgotten that he had his hand there, as he started looking around the room. “Do you have a phone? I think mine’s back in the library, unless you grabbed it when you kidnapped me.”

Zinedine came back in time to hear that. He gave Pep a mobile and then took their plates and glasses. He was doing an excellent job of pretending that the whole situation wasn’t completely hilarious to him and for a moment it made Luís heartily dislike him.

“Xavi!” Pep said loudly by Luís’ ear. He was still crowded up next to Luís, and in the end Luís had to pry the man’s hand off his knee and push Pep back. “Xavi, listen, I…oh, oh, really? Was anybody hurt? No? Oh, that’s good. I’m really sorry about that, I should’ve thought and—oh, no, no, no, I’m fine! I’m…well, it’s difficult to explain and it’ll have to wait anyway because Wenger’s team is in trouble.”

After a moment, Luís pulled out his own phone. He started to scroll through his contacts list.

“I’m sorry, but we need to do this first. Tell them whatever you want but I’m not coming back till I help them,” Pep said firmly. He paused and listened to whatever Xavi was saying, then sighed gratefully. His hand went out and groped absently at the table, and then he looked up with a frown. Then he started to get up. “So this is what I need you to do.”

Luís grabbed Pep’s arm and pulled him back down; Zinedine might be in a disgustingly good mood, but it was still never wise to walk in on him unexpectedly. “What?” Luís hissed.

‘Water,’ Pep mouthed, looking annoyed. Then his expression smoothed back out and he turned to the phone. “Break into Cruyff’s office, get the El Siete file and find the coordinates for site thirty-six. Then call—wait a moment.” He looked at Luís, who’d gotten up and found some bottled water in a cabinet. “What’s this phone’s number?”

“I can’t tell you.” Luís handed over the bottle and Pep had to stop working up his outrage to nod a thanks. “Tell him to meet you at your house when he’s got it. We’ll go.”

“I’ll see you at my place at six,” Pep obligingly said. He fumbled the bottle with one hand till he had it by the top, then twisted off the cap and flicked it to the table. Then he swigged from it as if it was filled with much stronger stuff and someone had just told him he’d lost his job. “No, you can’t wait for a records request. Break into Cruyff’s office. Oh, er…if you could pack me a bag, that would be wonderful. Couple changes of clothes, my laptop…coolish weather and the hiking boots. Thanks so much, Xavi.”

He hung up and gave Luís the phone. After another drink of water, he noticed how Luís was looking at him and raised his brows.

“You normally tell your assistants to commit burglary?” Luís said.

Pep shrugged. “It’d take too long to get it any other way, and I can always explain to Johan when we get back. Xavi understands that. So just who’s coming with us? It’s in the mountains, so they’ll need some experience with that sort of terrain. Actually, can Xavi come? I trust him and he’s very experienced.”

“With mercenaries?” Luís asked skeptically, already turning around.

“Ah, no, not that one, but he’s not a bad shot with a rifle and he’s good at sneaking up on people,” Pep said. When Luís turned back, Pep sighed and tipped back his head a little. “Look, I’m just trying to be constructive. Xavi’s already here and he can help, so that’d be one less person.”

After a moment, Luís headed for the kitchen. He heard Pep exhale sharply, and then the scrape of chair legs as the man went after him. That was probably enough warning so he just went in and found Zinedine talking on a mobile while poking in the fridge. He coughed so Zinedine looked up, then handed the man back the mobile he’d lent to Pep.

“We’re going now. Usual number if you get any information,” Luís said.

“All right, Raúl knows you’re coming,” Zinedine said. “Have a good trip.”

Luís opened his mouth. Then he closed it, shook his head, and nearly pivoted into Pep. He stepped back and then around the other man, and then went back out where Pep grabbed onto his arm. Pep was saying something about being more cooperative and keeping lines of communication open, but he clammed up when Luís pushed him into the wall.

“Listen to me.” Luís flexed his hands on Pep’s biceps. “I know what I’m doing. I don’t need suggestions. I need information.”

At first Pep’s eyes had been wide with surprise but gradually the man’s face had settled into something more like flinty stubbornness. He pressed his lips tightly together and swallowed slowly. When he finally replied, his voice was slow with the care of someone trying not to bite someone else’s head off. “I appreciate that. I am not stupid, and I am not about to question your undeniable expertise in your area. But I also need information and you’re not giving it, and when you _do_ , you’re using entirely unnecessary force to make your point—”

“We’re not having this argument,” Luís said, and pushed himself off. He took a step away, then looked at Pep.

“It’s not an argument and if you think it’s one, that’s exactly the kind of unconstructive mindset that creates obstacles,” Pep muttered, levering himself off the wall. He stiffly brushed at his clothes, then threw back his shoulders and looked right back. “You’ve got all the signs of being intelligent enough to see that, so I don’t know why you keep putting on this act.”

Luís rolled his eyes. “It’s faster and it doesn’t make me your friend, which I’m not. We just have a temporary common goal. Come on.”

The dirty look Pep gave Luís wasn’t nearly as polished as his words, but the other man did come. He jerked at his shirt-collar again, holding his head up like a soldier. The determination and the fearlessness were admirable, but that was exactly why Pep was so irritating, Luís decided. That kind of attitude might carry an amateur through but it’d trip up a professional. The sooner they got this over with, the better.

* * *

“Yeah, one side’s out,” Theo said. He prodded at the window again, then hissed and ducked over to grab Nicklas’ head. “Down! Down! There’s a guard coming!”

“Mmph!” Nicklas said, but he immediately dropped to his knees. He let Theo off his back, then turned around and shot the other man an annoyed look. “You almost poked my eye out.”

Theo looked puppy-dog guilty. “Sorry. But hey, you really did break the window.”

“Just one side,” Robin said, up on his toes and squinting at the window frame. “The other three still look pretty solid.”

“What’s holding it in? Caulk or what? Can we scrape it off?” Cesc asked.

Robin started to look, but then hissed, which they all took to mean the guard was hanging around. They were quiet till Robin finally relaxed and gestured for them to stand up. Nicklas went back to the window and felt around the frame. “No, it’s pinched into the metal. The side I popped out feels like the rim was a bit shorter, but only on that side. I still think we could force it out, but it’d be loud if we did it all of a sudden.”

Damn it. Cesc bit his lip and stared at the window. Then he looked around, but he didn’t see anything that they could use to help push it out. They’d have to use their bare hands. “How often do the guards come around, do you know?”

“Nope. But I’ve still got my watch, so we can time it now,” Nicklas said, looking at his wrist.

“Okay. Figure that out, then we’ll work on getting the rest of the window out,” Cesc said.

* * *

Zlatan shifted his weight to his other leg and the towel around his waist slid to his hips. He scratched at his belly right around the towel and the tops of his hipbones began to show. “Seriously, I’d really like to help, but I’m all booked up.”

Pep took a breath like he was going to say something and Luís stepped forward, then put back his arm and grabbed Pep’s wrist. He gripped it hard as he looked Zlatan up and down. “You’re booked.”

Mussed hair, fingernail scratches zigzagging over his shoulders, vaguely dopey look lingering in his eyes. “Yeah,” Zlatan said. “Sorry.”

“Ibra, I don’t say this often, but I—” Luís started.

Alessandro Nesta stomped up out of nowhere, also towel-clad, and dripping wet into the bargain. He shoved Zlatan aside and leaned out to glower at Luís. “He’s busy and I don’t want to hear it.” He leaned back in and glowered at Zlatan. “It takes five seconds to say ‘sorry, no time’ and shut the door! You’ve been so long that the water’s getting cold.”

“So sorry, princess, but I’m kinda trying to explain to my friend here that—”

“Don’t you ‘princess’ me! Who was whining about how he didn’t have legroom on a goddamn Vespa? They come in one fucking size and you deal with it.”

“Why don’t you both come?” Luís interrupted. “We need the manpower.”

Nesta rolled his eyes, then jabbed Zlatan in the chest. “You told everyone you were out to lunch. Right. Your _brain_ , maybe.”

“You are such a fucking—” Zlatan stopped himself and managed an apologetic look for Luís “—look, I’m really sorry, but we can’t—”

“Is that Figo?” Paolo Maldini strolled up on a pair of crutches, making it look completely natural to be that graceful. He was fully dressed and other than the wrap on his leg, in the peak of health. “Oh, hi! I’m so sorry, I just heard what you were asking and we can’t go. Any other time we’d love to, but…”

Nesta hiked angrily at his towel. “His knee’s done in and this idiot just _had_ to pick an argument with De Rossi and that lot. We’re not going anywhere till that’s settled, so fuck off.”

Zlatan’s eyes bulged in surprise, making him look more than a little froglike, if frogs came in gigantic. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at Nesta. “Well, I could’ve apologized if you’d _not_ tossed all that gelato—”

“You could’ve? Don’t act like you were ever going to, you fucking numbskull.”

“Don’t call me a numbskull! And as for apologizing, you just told Figo to fuck off! And threw gelato at them! _You_ should’ve apologized if anybody was going to!”

Paolo swung around and took the door with him, so his body blocked the view just as Zlatan lunged. He winced a little at the splats of towels hitting the floor, then rearranged his face into politely rueful. “Honestly, I’m sorry. Have you tried Rui Costa?”

“He’s in Portugal and it’s a rush job,” Luís said. “It’s all right, I’ve got others on the list. It just would’ve been nice to have Ibra along, but I understand…”

“He’s a little occupied,” Paolo nodded, and shut the door.

Luís stared at it for a few seconds. “I had no idea those three were even talking to each other.”

“That was…I don’t really know much about mercenaries but that seems like unprofessional behavior for any occupation,” Pep said.

“Oh, we have private lives like everyone else. Don’t get your nerves all twisted up, all right? Like I told them, there are others,” Luís muttered, turning around.

Or he tried to turn, but he’d forgotten he had Pep’s wrist and the other man didn’t move. Luís dropped the man’s arm and Pep stepped in front of Luís. He put his hand up palm out to make sure Luís stopped and Luís smacked it away, but Pep somehow twisted his arm around and got a handful of Luís’—fresh, unripped—shirt. “I’m concerned for my friends and I want to know you’re taking this seriously.”

“I _am_. It’s my life at stake too,” Luís snapped. “You’re the one delaying things right now.”

“I’m not in such a hurry that I’m going to allow botching the job,” Pep said. His free hand came up and jabbed a finger at Luís’ face. “It’s not just your life. And frankly, with your profession, I don’t know if you really put the right kind of value on lives. Even your own.”

It was a hell of a time for the man to start thinking about that. But it was also a hell of a time for Luís to lose his temper, so he concentrated on not. He took a deep breath, rolled back his shoulders, and looked Pep in the eye. At first Pep just stared back but after a few moments he began to soften out of sheer confusion about what Luís was doing. At that point Luís put his hands up on Pep’s arms, loosely so it was clear he wasn’t trying to restrain the other man.

“Listen to me. We’ll get your friends back, and save the world and all that. But if we’re going to do that, you need to _listen_ to me. I know what I’m doing and if I say we’ve still got options, we’ve got options.” Luís paused a beat, then dropped his voice for the closer. “If you can’t listen to me, then I can’t help you.”

Pep pursed his lips. He glanced down, then back up; his fist let the folds of Luís’ shirt slip away. “I’m listening. I just—I’m worried.”

“I know you are.” It was hard to keep the irony out of his voice, but that was why Luís was a goddamn professional. “But it’ll be all right.”

“You’re sure?” Pep said. Both his arms dropped to the side and he stared at Luís like no one had ever said that to him before—or at least nobody that he’d believed. He stared like no one who’d ever had somebody lie to him and found out about it should have.

Then he looked away, abruptly busy with some wrinkle in his suit. The lack of his stare came as a relief to Luís, but what was an even greater relief was when Pep wheeled and marched down the walk past Luís, because that kept Luís from thinking about why that stare had been so damn uncomfortable.

“Then come on!” Pep called over his shoulder. “Where are we going now? Who are we seeing?”

* * *

“Odd time for a coincidence,” Luís had to say.

Raúl sighed and shifted on his crutches. “Not a coincidence. Ibrahimović actually happened to be—but that’s a long story and not really what you need to know. What you need to know is that I’m very sorry.”

And the man looked it, from the curls drooping over his brow to the slumped shoulders. He barely even stirred when a loud crash came from somewhere in the house behind him. It was annoying but Raúl was so clearly depressed by it that Luís couldn’t work up the energy to fault him.

“Well, so now what?” Pep demanded, turning to Luís.

Raúl lifted his head and frowned at him; when they’d first showed up, Raúl hadn’t seemed to take in Pep’s presence, so busy was he trying to tell Luís that he’d tried to tell Zinedine on the phone that he couldn’t do it. But now Raúl was giving Pep a long once-over and his mouth was twitching, and Luís probably needed to say something quick.

“Is that Figo?” boomed a voice to Raúl’s left. Fernando Morientes bounded up and beamed out the door. “I didn’t know you were in town! You should’ve rung us up—we could’ve gone out. There’s a great musical on, I don’t know if you saw the billboards—”

“Probably not, because he’s a fucking good pro and he doesn’t get _distracted_.” David Villa stomped around the corner of the house, hoe hoisted over one shoulder. In his other hand he had a pair of shoes that didn’t look to be in his, Raúl’s or Fernando’s size. “Fucking musicals.”

Fernando’s smile went to flat ice so fast that Luís blinked to check his eyesight. “There’s nothing wrong with musicals,” Fernando said, voice dropping dangerously. “You know what’s a problem? When certain people think they’ve got a monopoly on strategic planning and really they couldn’t plan their way out of a paper bag without losing their temper.”

Raúl and Luís both winced. Then Raúl put his left crutch out in front of Fernando. “Please, can we not—there’s a guest—”

“Oh, yeah, like a fucking rocket launcher is a strategy,” Villa snapped. “If we left it all up to you, Raúl’d be missing his whole goddamn leg instead of just having a sprained ankle—”

“Well, all your head is good for is using to spike open bottles—speaking of which, I need a bottle opener—” Fernando snarled back, holding up a beer bottle.

Raúl’s face flickered as he switched off the guilt. He repositioned his crutch behind Fernando, then whacked it into the other man’s back as Fernando leaned out to wave the bottle in Villa’s face. Fernando stumbled forward, glanced off of the arm Luís had stuck out to block him and then swerved to avoid Villa. While he was doing that, Raúl had shuffled back into the house with amazing—if a tad crablike—speed and slammed shut the screen door.

“You know what,” Raúl said to Luís. “They’re free, and David has some friends who’ll probably not mind the work. Take them.”

Villa and Fernando didn’t quite hear that and got a couple zingers into an argument before they turned around. They stared at Raúl with incongruously harmonious expressions of befuddlement.

Luís thought it over, decided Raúl was right and grinned. “Thanks.”

“Wait,” Villa said. He took the hoe off his shoulder and took a step towards the door.

“No! No, you go and help Luís. You both need something to keep you busy while I heal up, and there’s not enough around here.” Then Raúl flashed his eyes at Fernando, who’d moved as if to come forward as well. Fernando stopped, looking shocked and hangdog, and Raúl just hardened his expression. He had by far the best glower of the three, even through wire mesh. “You’re driving me _insane_.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just he—” Fernando started, pointing at Villa.

Villa pointed back. “He’s the one—”

They both moved towards the door. Raúl dropped one crutch and grabbed past the doorframe, then awkwardly straightened up. He had a shotgun in his hand and looked more annoyed than ever.

“Is this ‘professional’ too?” Pep hissed. “Should we try someone else?”

Luís just moved them out of the line of fire and let Raúl finish glaring Fernando and Villa into unhappy comprehension. When those two’s shoulders slumped, Raúl lowered the shotgun and softened his expression. He sighed. “I’ll be fine. I can call Iker if I need anything. Now go help out Luís since I can’t.”

Villa muttered something to himself, then grimly tossed the shoes behind a bush. He reluctantly turned towards Luís, raking one hand through his hair. Fernando was a little slower: he jiggled the bottle in his hand, then raised that hand and opened his mouth.

“I’m _not_ letting you back in till afterward,” Raúl said. He took a step back. “And you had better have straightened things out by then.”

Then he shut the inside, non-mesh door. For a moment Fernando stared at it with a crumpled face. Then he gritted his teeth, pulling back his lips at the same time, and hissed a breath through them. He twisted the cap off the bottle with his palm, unlocked his jaw long enough to swig his beer, and then looked at Luís.

“Right,” Luís said. “We’re going into the mountains. Hostage situation, lots of mercs, some antiques involved—”

“They’re not just _antiques_ ,” Pep interrupted. “They have the potential to unleash incomprehensible—”

“Look, details in a sec. I’m just giving them the overview so we can get started,” Luís told him. Then he turned back to the other two. “So we’re going to need a team. Who’s free?”

Fernando bit his lip—if Iker was helping out Raúl, probably everybody Fernando knew was tied up doing the same—while Villa pulled himself up to his full height. “Silva, Mata, Joaquín, Pablo, basically all of Los Che.”

All excellent choices, although as a collective they had a somewhat checkered reputation. But given the short notice and the crazy elements involved, it should work. There was just one outstanding concern. “Since Raúl isn’t coming, we need somebody else who’s familiar with the Madrid method. How’s Quique on that?”

Villa did the physical equivalent of a stutter. “Quique? It has to be Quique?”

“We’re in a hurry,” Luís said.

“Well, then that’s a problem. Albelda and Quique are…” Villa grabbed his own throat and mimed strangulation.

“Is it good to have internal splits?” Pep asked, obviously also noting Fernando’s inappropriately hungry smile at Villa’s acting. “Doesn’t that undermine the team spirit?”

Villa looked oddly at him. Luís cleared his throat and then stepped in front of Pep; he ignored the not-really-suppressed noise of outrage behind him. “Look, get Albelda and then I’ll see what the problem is.”

“Okay, fine, but it’s your funeral,” Villa muttered.

* * *

Manu jumped back from the door, then whirled and rushed up to Nicklas and Samir. He started tugging at Samir’s legs. “Get down! Somebody’s coming!”

“Shit!” Samir dropped his arms to Nicklas’ shoulder and began to slide off the other man. Then he stopped and swore again. “Shit! How do we hide the window?”

They all looked up at it. In the past few hours they’d managed to wiggle out most of a second side, but they were far from being able to pop the whole thing. To keep the outside guards from noticing, they’d pulled the Plexiglas inside so a quick glance at it wouldn’t give anything away. But that only worked if you were looking at it from outside. If you were standing inside, there was no way you’d miss it.

“Push it back,” Cesc finally ordered. When the others just looked at them, with the guards’ footsteps getting ever louder, he lost it a little bit and jerked his hands up and down. “Push it back! As long as the frame’s bent we can get it back out again. And then Nicklas, stand in front of it. Try to block it with your head.”

After another excruciating moment, Samir hiked himself back up Nicklas and shoved at the Plexiglas. They all winced a little at the _click_ of it back into the frame. Well, it couldn’t be helped, Cesc told himself, and swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. Besides, they hadn’t _failed_ yet. They weren’t even done trying. It was just intermission.

The footsteps tromped up to the door, then stopped. There was some clicking and one irritated “then you do it!” before the door swung open. Deco walked in, flanked by Ballack and a shorter balding Portuguese man who’d been one of Cesc’s interrogators.

“What?” Nicklas said, a little too sharply.

Cesc hissed inwardly but didn’t even dare turn to see if Nicklas was standing where he should be. He just kept his eyes on Deco, who looked somewhat less mournful than the last time Cesc had seen him.

Deco pointed at Cesc. “I want to talk to you again.”

“Me?” Cesc said, raising his hand to his chest.

Ballack made a disbelieving sort of grunt, while the balding Portuguese guy just trudged forward and grabbed Cesc by the arm. They hauled him out of the prefab and down a short path into one of the tents. The cots had been taken away and inside was only a large table with lots of maps, some of which Cesc recognized as Wenger’s copies, lying on it. At one end was a nervous-looking Almunia under guard, which explained whether or not he’d gotten away.

They marched Cesc up to the other and then made him sit down. Then Deco shoved a map and a stapled packet in front of Cesc. “Explain this.”

Cesc blinked at the stuff a couple times. He looked at Deco, who gestured impatiently. “Um, can they let go of my arms?” Cesc asked. “Or are they gonna turn the pages for me?”

Across the table, Almunia snorted. He folded up his mouth and dropped his eyes to the table when Ballack looked at him.

Deco sighed and signaled for Ballack and the other guy to let Cesc go. Now that he had his hands, Cesc made quick work of leafing through the papers. The map was a pretty crude drawing of what Cesc thought was the tower from an aerial point of view; some of the ink rubbed off on Cesc’s fingers so they must’ve drawn it only a little while ago. The packet was a bunch of photocopies of old-looking texts in Latin and archaic Castilian. It talked about what was actually inside the tower in a lot more detail than the texts Wenger had did.

“Does it tell us how to get inside?” Deco asked after a few minutes.

“Um, maybe,” Cesc muttered.

Ballack leaned over Cesc so the rifle slung over his shoulder bumped Cesc’s head. “Maybe?”

“Well, it says what’s inside and all, but it doesn’t say how to get into it.” Cesc looked up quick at the hiss and found Almunia trying to stare some secret message at him. Then one of Almunia’s guards whapped his head and Almunia went back to looking plain freaked out, and Cesc had Deco sighing in his face again. “Look, I think I told you before but there’s supposedly all these boobytraps and stuff in there. This says what those are but it doesn’t say how to get through them, really.”

“You seem like a smart boy. I’m sure you can figure it out,” Ballack said meaningfully.

Deco shot him a surprised look. “What? No. He said keep him intact till we get confirmation about Wenger.”

Ballack’s eyes narrowed. “We’re also on a timeline. We need to get in there.”

“And we will, but not by using up good resources on stupid stunts,” Deco snapped. “You want to be risky, you go right ahead. That’s what you were hired for. That’s your job. My job is to keep this going according to orders.”

“If you’re that worried about what the boss thinks, I’ll tell him I took responsibility for pushing the job ahead,” Ballack said in a slow, contemptuous drawl.

Somehow Deco managed to look outraged and doleful at the same time. He slapped his hand down on the table and jutted his chin up at Ballack. “Outside. Now. Ricardo, keep an eye on things in here.”

The balding guy nodded and Deco and Ballack exited the tent. Why, Cesc didn’t know, since they could still hear the argument. Deco thought Ballack was an uppity piece of muscle, Ballack thought Deco had no balls, Deco told Ballack that he’d been watching idiots try to shortcut the boss for years and there was a damn good reason why he was the only one left. Ballack asked if Deco was including himself as one of those idiots.

“You all right?” Almunia asked shakily.

Cesc shrugged. “Not even an air mattress and the food sucks, so it’s just like the dig in Asturias.”

Almunia twitched, then let out a short bark of a laugh. His guards eyed him like they thought he might be losing it too. “Of all the times to be a smartass, Cesc.”

“I’m not a smartass. I’m just saying.” Cesc _was_ scared, but he just couldn’t be that and only that. He couldn’t help trying to keep thinking. Especially since Christ, but if the texts Deco had given him were authentic and true, then they really could get inside.

He’d just looked down at them again when Ballack and Deco came back in, both slightly disheveled. Ballack lounged off in the corner while Deco went up and yanked at Cesc’s shoulder. “That at least says where each trap is and what it is, doesn’t it?” Deco demanded.

“Yeah. Kinda. You gotta convert to modern measurements first,” Cesc said after a moment.

Deco looked at Almunia, who’d half-started out of his seat at Cesc’s words. Almunia tried to shoot Cesc some kind of warning look but Deco started talking first. “You said you can do that. You can do that right now,” he told Almunia. “And then you and him are coming up there with us. If he can tell us where they are, you can tell us how they’re put together. You’re the engineer.”

“I’m not—this isn’t really the kind that I do,” Almunia said half-heartedly. “I told you up there.”

“Well, you’ll have to make it the kind you do. Or else the rest of your team’s going to suffer for it,” Deco snapped.

Suddenly Cesc saw why Almunia was so nervous. He bit his lip and stared at the papers, then jerked his head up as somebody tried to pull him up from the chair. “Wait! Wait a second. We can’t go now.”

“You can read and walk at the same time, can’t you?” Ballack remarked dryly.

“Yeah, but it’s not that! It’s this.” Cesc jabbed at the topmost paper. “Says you have to wait for the winter solstice to light up a certain spot. I mean, we don’t have to wait for _that_ , but we need to figure out where it is and Robin’s the one who knows how to work the astronomical software. You didn’t junk our laptops, right?”

Both Ballack and Deco gave Cesc their versions of the stinkeye, Ballack’s being by far the better one. But Cesc knew what he was talking about and stared right back, and finally Ballack shrugged. Deco didn’t like that little attempt to be the decision-maker and stared hard at Ballack as he spoke. “Fine. Ricardo, take him back to his friends. He can explain that if he doesn’t do his job, we’ll start taking them out one by one. Then get him and this Robin back here.”

* * *

Albelda’s uncompromising, mean squint would’ve done a mule proud. “No. He’s a snide bastard who never gives the people who do his dirty work the credit they deserve and then bitches about being unappreciated.”

Villa threw up his hands and then looked at Luís to check if Luís saw what he saw. Luís saw, all right, and believed Villa’s hardass act even less than before. “David. I’m not asking you two to dance a goddamn tango. I’m asking you to coordinate on a—”

“No!”

“—with lots of other people you can take out your issues on!”

“No! No, no, _no_! I am not working with that piece of shit!” Albelda snarled, thrusting his face forward. He went nose-to-nose with Luís. “It’s either me or him. And you know the rest of the boys don’t like going without me.”

Luís stood firm and stared Albelda right back. He’d give Albelda a few seconds, just for the man’s pride, and then he’d show him what he knew about working with pieces of—

Albelda went sideways by jagged increments. He didn’t seem to understand either and tried to turn his head to see, but by then it was too late. Pep had a good grip on Albelda’s lapels and was in full swing, shaking Albelda so hard that Albelda’s teeth were clicking. “You don’t _understand_ , this is much, much _bigger_ than any personal dispute! I don’t know what your history is with this Quique and I’m not going to sit in judgment, that’s not my place, but what I am going to do is tell you that if you _don’t_ see the bigger picture, you’ll forever regret—”

And then the two of them disappeared into the house. There was a thump and a stifled curse from Albelda that barely got out before Pep’s voice ratcheted up another level, both in volume and in earnestness. Just listening to Pep made Luís feel…feel…

“Is he supposed to do that?” Villa asked.

Luís blinked, shook himself and then looked at the other man. “Who? Albelda?”

“No, this Guardiola guy. I thought you said he was an archaeologist,” Villa said. He scratched a sideburn. “That’s gross assault right there.”

“I think Albelda can take it,” Luís muttered. The man was a hardened veteran, and anyway, it wasn’t as if Pep tried to be violent. He just tended to be grabby and about the worst that came of that was the inappropriate—Luís jerked up his head. Then he quickly went into the house, with an over-the-shoulder order for Villa to wait on the doorstep.

Thankfully they hadn’t gotten far, but Pep did have Albelda pinned up against a wall. All Luís could see of Albelda was a bulging eye and a half and one hand clamped over Pep’s shoulder. Luís didn’t even think about finessing it: he just went up behind them, knotted his arms around Pep’s waist and yanked back as hard as he could.

Albelda’s bulging eyes came with them. Then Albelda managed to grab a chair and half-dragged himself away. “All right, all right!” he screamed. “I’ll go get him! I’ll get Quique, I’ll help, just get away from me—”

Pep wasn’t really in listening mode, although once his hands had come off Albelda, he at least just used them to gesture wildly instead of trying to grab something else. Luís hauled Pep back a few more steps, then twisted the man around. He figured if Pep saw someone else, it might break his concentration.

It took a second, but Pep stammered on a word, blinked hard and then slumped against Luís’ chest. “Oh,” he said. He absently patted Luís’ shoulder. His eyes really did amazing things when he was flipping modes. That glint was just the least of it. “Oh, then it’s all right?”

“Yes!” Albelda said shrilly. “It’s fine! We’ll be fine! We’ll be fine if I have to stick my boot up Quique’s ungrateful ass the whole time! Just stop yelling at me!”

“Yes,” Luís said, staring at Pep. Then he put the man down flat on his feet and stepped back. And told himself he had not been feeling some bizarre resonance to Pep’s voice, because he liked his life the way it was and that was because he knew a life-changer when he saw one. “Right. Well, David, you can take Mori to go get Quique while Villa rounds up the other Los Che boys. Pep and I have to do an errand, but we’ll meet you all at the airport. You can get the details from Mori.”

Albelda slowly pushed himself off the chair. He edged around it, keeping one eye on Pep, and then made a blatant run for Villa in the doorway.

“Sorry,” Pep said, suddenly looking at his feet and fussing with his clothes. He took a couple hesitant peeks at Luís. “I didn’t mean to lose it like that with him. I’m just—this is so _important_. At least, I don’t have any problem seeing how important it is, and I just want other people to see it the same way.”

“It’s all right.” Luís turned away, rubbing at his temple. “He’ll be fine. We’re going to your house now and meeting with your assistant, so no more yelling.”

Pep came up beside Luís and put his hand on Luís’ arm. “I really do appreciate you doing this. Even if it’s for your own reasons. It’s still helping—”

Luís just walked away. Behind him he heard a startled, hurt inhalation, but he didn’t look back. Sheer persistence would make Pep come along eventually; Luís didn’t need to encourage it.

* * *

“Look, if you want to mess around with arcsines and altitude regressions, be my guest,” Robin snapped. “Otherwise just give me a moment. I’m going as fast as the computer can, and it’s not my fault that our university won’t pay for an upgrade.”

Both Cesc and Almunia tensed, but this time Ballack just slouched against the tentpole. Maybe it was because Deco had finally gotten bored and wandered off, but Ballack seemed a little less uptight. “Okay. Calm down,” Ballack said. “If you don’t do it right, you’ll have to start over again.”

Robin blew out his cheeks, chipmunk-style. He ran one hand over his head, squinted one-eyed at the laptop, and then tapped a few keys. “I _know_ that.”

Ballack snorted in what seemed like amusement. But then he straightened up and flicked a look in Cesc’s direction; Cesc immediately bent back to his translating efforts.

“And I am calm,” Robin added in a mutter. “As calm as I can be when you have a fucking big gun to my head.”

“My gun is not at your head, it’s at my side.” Yeah, that was amusement in Ballack’s eyes. He tilted his head and watched Robin work for a few seconds. “Speaking of, how’s your side?”

Robin finally looked up. His hand started to reach for his ribs before he caught himself and deliberately put it back on the keyboard. “It’s okay.”

“The doc said you were lucky the bone didn’t break,” Ballack said. He rubbed at the side of his face, then raked some hair back from his face. When Deco had gone, he’d taken the other guards with him, though Cesc thought there were a couple outside. Not that Ballack looked like he was counting on them. He was looking like he thought Robin was—he had _so_ just checked out Robin’s back as Robin had rolled one shoulder. “And that that was a bad bruise you gave Lassana.”

“He hit me with a shovel. What was he expecting, a thank-you?” Then Robin almost hissed as Cesc poked his foot. He just barely turned it into a disgusted look at the computer screen. Then he shot Cesc a questioning glance while hitting the ‘Enter’ key. “This is going to take a few minutes to run before I can do the next one.”

Cesc caught Almunia’s eye and gestured for him to get out of the tent somehow. Almunia looked horrified and Cesc wanted to roll his eyes but knew Ballack would see that. So he just glowered at Almunia and prayed damn hard, and miracle of miracles, Almunia got an idea. He’d been around them long enough, for God’s sake.

Almunia asked to go to the toilet. Ballack frowned at him, but finally called in another guard to uncuff Almunia from the seat and take him. While Ballack was busy with that, Cesc hastily scribbled a note and then flashed it at Robin. He knew Robin had read it when Robin looked shocked, then dubious, and _then_ resigned.

The guard took Almunia out. Ballack settled back against his pole. Robin shot a dirty look at Cesc, then slowly pushed himself back in his seat. He glanced over his shoulder at Ballack. “I’m just stretching. I’ve got cramps.”

“Hmm,” Ballack grunted noncommittally. He watched Robin twist his arms around; his eyes dropped when Robin lifted his arms over his head, pulling up his shirt to show a strip of midsection skin. “How much longer, do you think?”

Cesc covertly erased the note he’d made, translated another phrase, and eyed Robin’s carefully blank face.

“Maybe an hour, if we’re lucky. The numbers we’re getting from those texts aren’t very accurate. Which isn’t Cesc’s fault, it’s just the way they wrote the damn stuff. But that’s archaeology for you,” Robin said. He turned and looked at Ballack. “Why are you in a hurry? Your boss knows nobody’s even going to look for us for another couple of days.”

Ballack grinned, then jerked his chin at Cesc. “Your friend there called somebody.”

“Yeah, but I thought I heard somebody say that got stopped,” Cesc said. He tried to look as depressed as possible. It should’ve been easier than it was, but a vein in the temple Robin had facing Cesc was throbbing and Cesc couldn’t help looking at it.

“And anyway, it’s not like we know any guys like you,” Robin said. He sounded a bit stiff and for a moment Cesc thought he’d blown it, but then Robin shrugged. “We’re all students and professors. You’re the…soldiers?”

“Not—that.” A slight shadow passed over Ballack’s face. Then he grinned at them again and it vanished. “Call us specialists.”

Cesc snorted. “That one guy called you dumb muscle.”

Robin kicked Cesc under the table, but kept himself turned towards a suddenly-tense Ballack. He half-glanced at Ballack, then looked back at Cesc. “Hey, at least he knows what a regression is,” Robin said. “You mean the guy with a face like somebody took his candy? He didn’t get it till he—” nod to Ballack “—explained it to him.”

“Hey, I’m just saying what I heard,” Cesc said.

“Yeah, well.” With a shrug, Robin looked back at Ballack. “Hey, do you even know what you’re going to be going down the tower for? Because it’s kind of…I mean, I wouldn’t want to go down without knowing.”

Ballack raised his brows. “What’s down there?”

“El Siete,” Robin said. “It’s this legend. It—he was a mythical hero in medieval times, this general who couldn’t stop winning. They say he discovered the secret to an unstoppable force that he’d use against his enemies. When he died, he was so afraid that it’d be misused that he had it buried with him.”

“ _Ah_ ,” Ballack said, like he hadn’t known. He crossed one arm over his chest and mulled that over, and then he suddenly threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, you’re very…very nice. For only students.” And suddenly he was up on his feet and looking at them and Cesc heard paper crumple under his clenching fingers. “But don’t think I’m stupid either. I know what’s down there, and I’m going to get it.”

After a moment, Robin managed a breath. He needed a visible effort to do it but he raised his chin. “Relax, would you? We’re just talking. My computer’s fucking slow and we’re chained to these chairs, and it’s not like we have anything else to do. I mean, if you want us to shut up, you can always say so.”

“Yes. But you’re right.” Ballack dropped back into his amused slouch before half-stifling a yawn. His eyes weren’t any less keen. “This is boring. And slow. And you are more interesting than I thought you’d be. So we can talk a little. But you keep an eye on your work, yes? And no tricks. Or else we’ll just have to put up with me shutting you up.”

“Yeah, sure,” Robin said. He turned back to the computer and sneaked a what-now look at Cesc while he was at it. “Guess we should be glad it’s at least you and not what’s-his-name with the sad face and no sense of humor.”

“Deco is an idiot,” Ballack agreed under his breath.

After this many years of coordinated hijinks, Cesc and Robin didn’t need to even look at each other. Cesc just handed Robin the slip with the next bit of translation and Robin read it. “Deco? What kind of name is that?” Robin wondered aloud.

Ballack snorted unpleasantly. “If you believe him, some nickname. He says…”

And they were back on. The only thing was, Cesc really wished he knew how progress with the window was going. But he trusted his friends to figure things out, and he knew they trusted him and Robin to handle things on their end. They’d just have to wait to see when and where and how they could bring it all together.

* * *

Guardiola lived in a surprisingly nice house, with a couple metal sculptures integrated into a neat lawn. He pointed out his assistant’s car parked at the curbside as they approached, then reached for the door. Luís grabbed his arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I have to get the gate,” Pep said curtly. “Xavi obviously decided to wait inside.”

“No, we’ll park and both go in,” Luís said after a moment. It looked like a nice house and Pep looked like a nice man, but that second bit at least wasn’t exactly up to advertising. And Luís remembered what Pep had said about Xavi and rifles.

He swerved away from the gate and went a block down the road before he parked. Then he got out and went around to finish opening the door for Pep. The other man gave him a surprised look before abruptly pivoting away and stalking up the sidewalk, leaving Luís to lock up and then have to hurry to keep pace.

Pep turned his shoulder to Luís’ reprimand and just let Luís hold his arm till it became clear that that wasn’t communicating anything to him. Then he opened the gate and let them into the front drive. A dim figure rose up on the house’s porch and they both stiffened, but then Pep let out a relieved sigh. “Xavi?”

Xavi came down the steps at a good clip. He was eyeing Luís warily but had his hands full with two duffel bags, so Luís didn’t account him much of a danger. Just as well, since Luís’ phone went off right then: Zinedine’s ringtone. Luís muttered to Pep that he needed to take it and stepped back a pace.

If Pep heard him, he didn’t signal it. Instead he just went and hugged his assistant, peppering the man with questions about the university and an investigation at the library and so forth in between fervent apologies for all the trouble. Then he and Xavi bent down to the bags. Xavi unzipped one and started pointing out things to Pep.

“You find him?” Luís asked.

*Yes, but he’s moving, heading for somewhere in the mountains. You’ll probably just meet up there,* Zinedine said. *But there’s a problem. He knows you’ve gone rogue and called in another team.*

Luís checked his watch. To be honest, it was about time, but Luís wouldn’t have said no to a longer grace period. But they’d not done too badly in the time they had had, with a team heading for the airport and just this meeting to conclude before they went there themselves. “You know who?”

*There are three of them, but I can only confirm Tiago,* Zinedine said. *Just keep an eye out.*

“Will do.” After a check on their travel arrangements, Luís hung up and indulged in a moment of disgust.

Well, Tiago wasn’t the worst that could’ve been thrown at them, Luís thought, and turned around to see Pep poking his head out of the gate. Xavi was back a few paces, both duffel bags slung over his back. The hair on the back of Luís’ neck stood up. “Pep!” he barked, starting towards them.

Pep didn’t look back. “I’m checking my mail, or else the neighbors will report—gah!” Half of him jerked out the gate before he slapped his arm around the brick column that made up one side. He was swearing and struggling against someone, and then he lost his grip and was dragged out.

The fence kept Luís from seeing everything till he’d nearly run down there, just in time to have the double barrels of a sawed-off shotgun shoved at him. He ducked, fell on top of Xavi and dragged the other man down too.

The blast passed harmlessly overhead as Luís yanked Xavi over him. He just glimpsed the shotgun being angled down towards them before they’d rolled out of the way. That blast seemed to graze one of the duffel bags, but Luís didn’t have time to check. He kept himself and Xavi rolling till they were on the other side of the gate, and then he got up on his knees and grabbed a duffel. He swung it at knee-high just as their attacker tried to run through the gate.

“Titi! Titi, they’ve got Pep!” Xavi was hissing. When Luís looked back, he found the other man on a…walkie-talkie. And then Xavi jerked his head sideways and his eyes widened.

Luís reached for his gun but Xavi was quicker, yanking what looked like a garden gnome out from behind him and hurling it at their attacker. It caught the man squarely in the head and put him out flat on his back, apparently unconscious.

“Maniche?” Luís said.

“Luís!” Pep shouted. “Xavi!”

The sound of a revving car engine drowned out the rest. Luís swore and scrambled to his feet. He flung himself through the gate just in time to see a black car take off down the road; Pep’s wide-eyed face was briefly visible through the back window. Then someone yanked him out of sight and Luís cursed again.

He turned to run to his car and rammed up against Xavi. The other man wavered but stood up to it, and then grabbed Luís’ arms. “No! Wait—”

Another car zoomed up, a tiny Renault. Its front passenger door was flung open and then its driver thrust out an arm to help Xavi shove Luís into that seat. The driver took off before Xavi had even gotten all the way into the back, not that Xavi was protesting. He was already screaming out details about the car—he had a remarkably good eye—and to follow it, Titi, before they lost Pep.

“I am, I am!” Titi’s hands were a blur between the stick shift and the wheel. He took the first corner on two wheels, then jumped to the sidewalk to swerve around another car that had gotten in between. Then he hit the road again and really floored it. They started out five cars behind but by the first roundabout, Titi had cut it to three.

At the roundabout Titi fishtailed the car into the next lane, then spun it like a top to follow Xavi’s yelled direction about which exit to take. Luís finally got a solid handhold about then, and knotted his fingers around it while he suppressed his nausea. He dragged himself up over the dashboard, then swore and ducked again. “Down!”

A bullet cracked the side mirror on Luís’ side. Three—Tiago was driving, probably, which left one to hold down Pep and shoot the gun. Suddenly Luís’ nausea spiked. He felt vaguely irritated with himself and then another bullet raked the car’s top, and Luís forgot about being sick. He hated being shot at. “Xavi?”

Xavi stopped shouting directions and stuck his head between the front seats. “Yes?”

“Got a rifle?” Luís asked.

“In the trunk,” Xavi said, looking oddly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were helping, we all just figured Pep had gotten—”

“Never mind, just get up to that car then. I just have a pistol and it doesn’t have the range.” Luís twisted his legs around till he could get them braced in the footspace, then pulled himself up the dash again. He hit the button to lower the window on his side, ducked as another bullet went whining by, and then took a look.

No, that was Tiago shooting at them. The man was in the driver’s seat, which explained the terrible aim. For a moment Luís couldn’t see anyone else, but then a flail of entangled hands whipped across the rear windshield. Pep was putting up a hell of a fight.

Good for him, but that made it a lot harder for Luís. He couldn’t shoot at the car’s body with just a pistol and no clear idea of where Pep was. He probably couldn’t shoot the wheels either, at the speed they were going. God knew how the car could flip.

“Where are they going?” Titi demanded. “Do you know?”

If they hadn’t killed Pep on sight, they were probably taking him—so they wanted him for something besides stopping the rescue. Luís put that aside to think on afterward. “Transport! They’ve got to get out of the city—train’s too slow—airport?”

Xavi slapped at the back of Luís’ seat. “They’re heading for the highway! He’s right!”

Something crackled. Titi didn’t take his eyes off the ramp they were careening up, but he did frown. “Who’s that?”

“Oh! Oh.” Xavi scrambled around the back seat.

Luís glanced back out the window, only to not see the car. “You lost them!”

“No, no, no,” Titi said, maneuvering their car like a laser-guided bullet around a large truck. “Shortcut. They’re heading for construction, it’ll slow them down.”

“I need to get right up to the car,” Luís told the man. “Right on it, basically.”

Titi nodded, then glanced over his shoulder. Then he looked back at the road as Xavi squeezed between the front seats again, walkie-talkie in hand. He was telling somebody named Gerard and Yaya that they weren’t at the house any more but to take care of the guy in the front yard if he was still there.

“Tell them to get my car,” Luís said. When Xavi looked at him, he told Xavi what his car looked like and after a moment, Xavi relayed those to his friends. “When we get Pep back, we need to get on our flight right away. My things are in there and I need them.”

Xavi nodded. “Okay. Where do they drive it?”

“I don’t need the car, just the things in the trunk,” Luís said after a moment. “Besides, I’ve still got my keys.

“We can just bring the whole car if that’d be easier,” Xavi said matter-of-factly, like that didn’t involve picking locks and hotwiring engines.

“There they are!” Titi yelped.

Luís jerked himself around and scanned the road before them. Then he saw Titi was actually pointing to the other side of it, at the opposite lanes. Construction signs warned of merging lanes and slow traffic. Heavy equipment was parked here and there, crossing onto their side of the highway. Titi cut inside a line of traffic cones and then zipped up a mound of dirt. The car slowed as the wheels sank into the soft earth, but they were going fast enough that they got to the top and then they were airborne and spinning.

Hitting the road on the other side knocked Luís back down to the floor, but he clawed his way up at Xavi’s shout. He saw they’d come down going across the lanes and right then they cut off a car. It slewed around them and Titi slewed around it, like some crazy carousel, and Luís saw Tiago’s openmouthed face in the driver’s seat.

Tiago banged into a bulldozer but kept the car going. It slowed him down and Titi, who’d avoided the bulldozer, managed to get them ahead of the car so Luís was on Tiago’s side. Luís jerked his gun out of its holster and hauled himself through the window. They were swerving too much for Tiago to aim at him, but he could aim at Tiago.

Something took off the side mirror, too damn close to Luís’ arm. He flinched, then saw a grim-faced man hanging out of the window behind Tiago. Oh, it would be Lucio—and Lucio’s grimness abruptly went to shocked rage as he was yanked back inside. He fought it while trying to shoot Luís at the same time; his shot went well wide. Unfortunately so did Luís’ shot.

Luís’ next one broke the front windshield but seemed to leave Tiago intact. Then Xavi yanked Luís back to keep him from losing his head on a backhoe. They lost some speed and when Luís got up again, the two cars were level. He shot at Tiago, more to keep the man from shooting at him than to kill him, and tried to see into the backseat.

The back door on Luís’ side suddenly flew open and somebody tumbled out. Luís’ throat closed on him and he almost threw himself through the window before he saw that one, it was Lucio and two, Lucio hadn’t fallen out. Somehow he’d gotten a crablike grip on the door and was clinging on despite the door swinging wildly. His enraged eyes stared into Luís’.

They widened. Lucio’s mouth opened as he gasped in a panic, but he couldn’t get another handhold in time. In a second he was a light-colored blotch behind them, and Luís was staring at Pep. The other man had managed to kick Lucio out but now he couldn’t pull in his legs and was barely keeping his feet from hitting the road.

“I’ll shoot him!” Tiago screamed wildly. He wrenched the car to keep it from hitting a barrel and its back end came towards Luís.

Luís dropped his gun on the front seat, braced himself and then flung open his door. He didn’t have time to think about how he was going to jump; he just did it and suddenly he was on Pep and the other man was gasping under him. Pep was moving so Luís hadn’t disabled him; Luís couldn’t worry about being sorry for any other injury. He nearly slid right back out of the car and just got his hand jammed into the seat in time. Then he felt Pep going and grabbed whatever part of Pep that he could reach. He threw out his leg, felt his heel hit something solid and pressed down on it as he shoved them off the seat to the floor.

Luís ended up with both feet digging into the bottom of the door frame but face-down. He twisted himself up in a hurry, only to have Pep elbow him down in the back of the head. The blow made Luís see white spots and the dying roar of a gun above them deafened him. Pep jerked against him and gasped in pain, mouth grazing Luís’ cheek.

Didn’t think. Didn’t look. Just whipped around and flung his arm up. His hand caught an arm and Luís yanked as hard as he could on it. He used it to haul himself up and then grabbed at a flailing black mass: Tiago’s head. Luís slammed it down into the steering wheel.

Tiago slumped. The car skidded around and headed for the railing at the side of the highway. Luís clawed at Tiago till he could get at the wheel, just in time to yank it around. They missed the barrier by a hair and were aimed at a concrete pipe instead. He spun the wheel again, pushing at Tiago’s body with his other hand, and also trying to pull his leg up between the front seats. He kicked something that swore in Catalan at him and Luís whistled his relief. He swerved them around the pipe, threw himself into the front seat and then got his foot down on the brake.

They screeched God knows how many meters, stopping just short of the actual traffic of the highway. Luís took a breath that turned out to be much bigger than he’d thought he’d need, and slumped into the seat. He raised one hand to wipe his brow, then hissed and twisted around. He got out of the car, went to the back and looked in. “Pep?”

Pep stared up from the floor. He’d lost one sleeve of his suit-jacket and was clutching his arm; blood was soaking out around his hand into his shirt. He had bruises on his throat and jaw and one cheekbone, and he couldn’t even answer because he was still gasping so hard.

“Oh, hell,” Luís said, and reached in. He got a fistful of Pep’s shirt, pulled the other man forward and kissed him.

Pep’s mouth was still wide-open and gasping. It twitched messily around Luís’ mouth, only touching Luís’ lips on one side while the rest lapped over Luís’ jaw. Then it closed a little, enough so that it fit Luís’ mouth perfectly. The man tasted like seven kinds of heaven.

The sound of another car coming made Luís jerk. He twisted away and Pep made an uncertain, annoyed noise. Luís glanced at him, then touched Pep’s bloody arm. “Bad?”

“Ah, just a graze, I think—”

“All right, we’ll get it seen to after we get on the plane.” Luís got hold of Pep’s good arm and pulled him out of the car. 

By then Titi was pulling up. Both doors on one side popped open; Luís took a moment to get his gun back before letting Xavi into the front and taking Pep with him into the back. He yanked his door shut, cut off Pep’s question and leaned forward to clap Titi on the shoulder. “Exit seven, now. It’s a private airfield and I’ll give you directions but you’ve got twenty minutes to get there.”

“No problem,” Titi said, already pulling away.

* * *

Almunia never did come back from the toilet. When asked, Ballack just shrugged and told Robin and Cesc that he’d get brought when he was needed but so far it was just looking at a computer, and they didn’t need another person to do that. That was a little creepy, especially the way that Ballack said it, but to be honest Cesc was relieved to not have to worry about Almunia screwing up the plan. The guy wasn’t nearly as in tune with things as Robin was.

“Yeah, but doesn’t that really eat into the paycheck?” Robin asked, slinging his arm over the back of his chair. “We’ve got a bunch of stuff we always have to ship, just because it’d be too much of a pain to go through customs, and it costs an arm and a leg.”

Ballack shook his head. “No, no, no. You don’t ship. You let somebody else handle your gear, you’re asking for them to lose it. You keep it with you but what you do is you fly charter if the client’s rich and smart. If client is dumb or stingy, you suck it up and use elite status to bypass the luggage check.”

Robin frowned and started to ask a question, but his laptop beeped. Both he and Ballack looked at it, and then Robin sighed and tapped the Enter key. “Almost done. Last round of calculations. So what elite status? Is there some kind of special merc pass or something?”

“No,” Ballack said, looking superior. “Just regular Platinum Flyer or whatever the airline calls it. No point in reinventing the discount when I already fly enough.”

“Fuck, you guys sign up for frequent flyer miles?” Robin blinked a few times, then shook his head. He absently ran a hand over the top of his head. “Wow. That—that makes so much sense, but I don’t think I would’ve…but wait, doesn’t that leave electronic tracks? Then they’ve got a file on you, don’t they?”

Ballack sighed. “Well, you don’t apply under your _actual_ identity.”

“Oooh,” Robin said, looking thoughtfully. Maybe he was just a little too in tune with it. He seemed to have totally forgotten that they kind of didn’t want Ballack to be a super-awesome international bad guy, or else they’d never have a chance.

“So did you have to do that to get here, or did they spring for charter travel?” Cesc asked, interrupting Robin’s next question.

“Charter,” Ballack said.

Cesc pushed aside his translations; he’d finished up a while ago. He surreptitiously twisted his chained ankles, both because the cuffs were really tight and because he was wondering how sturdy the chair was. After a while Ballack had gotten tired of leaning on the pole and had grabbed a seat between Cesc and Robin, and had mostly paid attention to Robin. He couldn’t really shoot as well sitting down, maybe. It’d be awkward—it _looked_ like it’d be awkward, anyway. Too bad Cesc didn’t have anything heavy to hand, but Robin had his laptop. “Nice. It sounds like a pretty cool job overall. Get to travel, get paid lots of money, have exciting adventures to tell the folks—”

“Oh, I don’t tell anybody about it unless I know they’re not going to talk about it,” Ballack said smoothly. He leaned back in his seat and rolled his shoulders, making his shirt strain over his arm muscles. His rifle clanged against his seat.

Fuck, Cesc thought, dropping his eyes. He chewed on his lip, then jumped as somebody pushed their way into the tent. Then he blew out a relieved breath when he saw it was Deco.

“I hope that’s because you’re done,” Deco said, irritated. Then he checked out Ballack and looked all disapproving. He pursed up his mouth, didn’t call Ballack on it and instead turned to Robin. “Well?”

“Just a…oh, done,” Robin said, turning to the laptop. He picked up his pen and began scribbling down numbers from the screen.

Deco turned around and gestured to somebody outside, and suddenly the tent was crowded with people. A guard pinned Robin’s arms back against the chair, making Robin drop the pen mid-writing, while another one unlocked his ankles. Two others did the same thing to Cesc and then cuffed his hands together in front of him.

“What’s going on?” Ballack had leaped to his feet and was now looking around with a mixture of shock and annoyance. “What are you doing? I thought—”

“New orders,” Deco said curtly. “They came in while you were having such a nice chat. We’re to try and at least find an entrance tonight.”

Cesc shared an alarmed look with Robin, then winced and checked to see if anybody had caught that. Thanks to Ballack’s death-stare at Deco, nobody had.

“Tonight,” Ballack repeated slowly. “When did these orders come in?”

As an answer, Deco pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and shoved it at Ballack. When the other man took it, Deco twisted on one heel and then gestured for the others to follow. The guards on Cesc gave him a shove in the back and he stumbled forward, yelping. Ballack’s head shot up and he put out his hand as if to stop Cesc. Then he withdrew it. His mouth had thinned out, but he didn’t say anything as he turned and followed them out.

* * *  
“You’re sure it wouldn’t be better to come along?” Xavi asked. “I believe you when you say that your men are all experienced, but this is an archaeological dig. There might be some things—”

“That I’ll be happy to leave it to the specialists for that, but I don’t think we’ve got to get involved with those now, and don’t plan on it. I’m just concentrating on getting your friends out and making sure nobody comes after us.” Luís heard his name being called and looked up.

They were standing on the tarmac at the airport. The plane was loaded and most of the people were already aboard, but a few were lingering on the stairs and around Zinedine, who was using a nearby crate as a table. He was giving the pilot some last instructions and had his head down, so Luís looked over at the stairs. A grumpy-looking Quique was sitting on the third from the bottom, waiting for Luís to wrap up with Pep’s help so he could whine. Four steps up from him, an exasperated Morientes was gesturing at Luís.

Luís signaled for him to wait a moment, then turned back to Xavi. “Look, I appreciate the offer but I think it’s better to not get complicated right now. As soon as we’re out, Pep can give you a call and you can get out to…secure the dig or whatever it is you have to do. In the meantime I think you’d be more helpful if you stayed in town and kept anybody from getting suspicious about Pep’s absence. Or from getting into his things. He’ll be out of reach but his files won’t be.”

Xavi looked unhappy about it, but he nodded readily enough. When one of his friends objected, he just shot them a look and they shut up. Then he helped Luís fold up the map of this site thirty-six. “Okay. Just…listen, make sure Pep is all right, and doesn’t do anything…irrational? He’s…he can be a little…hands-on when it’s not really a…great idea.”

“I’ve noticed,” Luís said dryly. He checked on Morientes—now with impatient hair-pulling—and then turned towards Xavi again. “I suppose that that’s why you all seem so well-versed in covert ops.”

It was getting dark but a faint tinge of red was visible in Xavi’s face. He ducked his head and scrubbed at one cheek. “Well, we’re here to help him with whatever he needs. That’s our job.”

“Does he do this kind of thing often?” Luís asked.

“Um, no, not…more than once a semester or so. Anyway, good luck.” Xavi stuck out his hand.

After a moment, Luís shook it. He appreciated the sentiment, but appreciated somewhat more the combination of worry and wariness he saw in Xavi’s eyes. When he took the man’s hand, Xavi slumped a little in relief and started looking at Luís with an earnest faith that was more than a little familiar. Morientes calling out at Luís again was a more than welcome interruption.

Zinedine raised his arm as Luís passed him, but only to make a silent farewell. He turned to go back to his car and Luís didn’t bother saying anything to him; they’d both known each other too long for that. Luís slowed a little to let the pilot go ahead of him, then walked to the boarding stairs.

Quique got up as Luís approached. He leaned against the railing, hands hooked over his pockets, and let Luís almost pass before he let fly. “David said it wasn’t him who wanted me, it was you.”

“You believe him?” Luís asked over his shoulder.

A short, raspy laugh came from Quique. “He’s a two-faced shit but he doesn’t hide behind other people. You know we’re going to kill each other.”

“As long as it’s after we wrap, I honestly don’t care.” Luís scratched at the side of his neck, then frowned as he glimpsed dirt under his nails. He rubbed at his shirt-collar, checked his fingers again and sighed. Two suits in a day. He hadn’t had it that bad since before Zinedine moved from assassin to organizational expertise. “You two do it beforehand and I’ll show you—”

“I get it,” Quique said shortly. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about Albelda coming after you with his wounded pride. That’s why he came after me.”

Then they got to the top and Quique slipped past Luís and Morientes, who’d retreated there, into the plane. Morientes shot Quique a doubtful look, then arched his brow at Luís.

“Well, unless you’re going to tell me you picked up the Madrid method from Raúl, I don’t want to hear it,” Luís said. “There some other problem?”

For a moment it seemed like Morientes’ injured pride was going to answer, but he finally just swallowed it and pointed towards the back of the plane. “Your client’s making a fuss and wants to talk to you. He’s driving _Silva_ batty.”

“He’s not my—all right. You going to keep an eye up front?” Luís asked.

That made Morientes feel a little better, and he ducked into the plane with a spring in his step. Too late Luís remembered about the man’s tiff with Villa, but he hoped that Raúl’s threat would make those two behave. Just to make sure, he stopped on his way back to have a word with Silva, who fortunately was just as disgusted with that pair as Luís was.

“Oh, and tell your client if he knows so much, he can stitch himself up next time,” Silva added as he squeezed past Luís in the aisle.

Luís opened his mouth, then just sighed. If they wanted to think Pep was his client, it would probably cause less problems than the truth. He scratched at his neck again, then just started pulling off his suit-jacket as he ducked through the curtain and into the back room.

It had no seats, just a cushioned bench along one wall that could double as a bed or an examining table when necessary. Pep was sitting on it, stripped to the waist and barefoot, and poking at the bandage on his arm. When he saw it was Luís, he started and dropped both hands to squeeze at the edge of the cushion.

“We’re about to take off,” Luís said. Just then the plane began to move and Luís braced himself against the wall, then shoved his suit-jacket into a trash-slot next to him. The plane briefly stopped moving and Luís went over and took a seat on the bench. He noted the way Pep stiffened up. “No, you can’t say goodbye to your assistant or whatever Xavi is. He was already leaving when I got in here. How’s your arm?”

“It’s fine,” Pep muttered. He kept his eyes on Luís as he shifted towards the other end of the bench. When he had the room, he swung his legs up and dug his heels into the opposite wall. “Why didn’t you come in and tell me—”

Luís undid the last button in his shirt and then pulled out his shirt-tails. “You’re in a hurry.”

“I am _not_ in such a hurry that I don’t want to say goodbye to my staff _and_ friends,” Pep snapped. “Especially when they’ve had to deal with a kidnapping—with _two_ kidnappings and—”

“Is this because I kissed you?” Luís sighed, looking over.

Pep’s eyes widened. He put his arm back into the wall with a thump, then hissed and hunched over, clutching at the bandage.

“Because I distinctly remember you inviting me to meet you more socially at some later time.” Luís let his shirt hang off his shoulders for the moment, since it was a bit chilly in the back. He undid his belt, left it to hang as well, and bent down to take off his shoes and socks. “You also said you were being honest. Of course, if you weren’t and you were just trying to throw me off, I understand that, but—”

“I just want to know what you think you’re getting out of this,” Pep abruptly said. “I can’t pay you, I don’t think you’re doing this because you believe it’s the right thing to do, and you said you weren’t interested.”

The socks smelled so Luís tossed them aside, but the shoes looked fine. He stowed those in the netting strung across the bottom of the bench, then straightened up. The plane was beginning to pick up speed. “I never said I wasn’t interested. I just said you didn’t need to do that to persuade me.”

Pep stared at Luís for several seconds, not moving. It gave Luís a chance to see what was under all that academic properness, and as it turned out, that was a lot of surprising definition. The man was so lean that he verged on skinny, but Pep obviously got out to the gym more than once in a while. And the spa: his chest was smooth, although the faint stubble Luís could see indicated that the man didn’t need much of a waxing.

“Are you…” Pep’s awkward gesture made Luís look up and catch the man blushing. Then Pep grimaced at himself and tucked his chin down. “I suppose I should thank you for coming after me again.”

“It’d be nice,” Luís agreed. He unstrapped his gun holster and looked to see if the safety was on, then stuck that down with his shoes. He got his knife off his ankle while he was at it, then sat up just as the plane’s engines really kicked in. “Look, you’re right that I’m not really doing this to better mankind. If that happens, that’s great but first and foremost I’m doing it because otherwise I’m going to have people coming after me and I hate that. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t admire you.”

Pep’s eyes widened. Then they narrowed. He opened his mouth.

“Not just the fact that you are somebody I’d probably hit on in a social situation, but also the fact that you’re persistent and smart, and that you can fight so hard for something you believe in. I might not share the belief but I respect it.” Luís paused a moment, listening to the engines. The plane’s momentum was pressing him back into the wall but it wasn’t that bad yet. “But that said, if you want this to work, you can’t argue with me every damn step of the way and you can’t irritate the people I’ve pulled into this to help.”

“I—thank you.” For a moment Pep was huddled in on his embarrassment, wrapping his good arm around himself and staring at his lap. Then he took a deep breath and lifted his head, and his gaze hardened. “But while you have a point, you can’t—I am _not_ arguing just to be difficult, I’m arguing because we _do_ have divergent interests and I can’t trust you to see to mine all the time.”

“Well, you have to trust me to some extent, or else you just end up in somebody else’s car,” Luís said. “That doesn’t help me, or you, or your friends.”

Pep took another deep breath, obviously struggling with his temper. He pushed himself up, despite the plane’s increasing speed, and jabbed a finger at Luís. “If you’d just tell me what’s going on, I wouldn’t feel compelled to do that!”

“What, get yourself snatched _again_ so we’ve got to waste time and put your friends here to the trouble of rescuing you?”

“That’s not what I mea—” Pep started hotly, jerking himself more towards Luís.

The plane suddenly tilted sharply. Pep didn’t have his legs braced anymore and he came sliding towards Luís, who narrowly got his eye away from Pep’s oncoming finger and twisted so he’d take Pep on his front. The impact drove the breath from Luís; his arms went around Pep out of instinct and then he just held on for a couple seconds, trying to get some air. Pep was hissing in pain and when Luís was up to it, he tried to check. But then the plane banked and he had to grab for an overhead strap to keep them in the seat.

“Arm,” Pep managed, his face smashed into Luís’ shoulder. He wriggled and one of his hands wormed its way across Luís’ stomach before reaching back to the wall. Then he tried to lift his head. “If you’d—just _tell_ me some things—”

“For God’s sake, it’s ten to fifteen minutes till we level out,” Luís said. “Can you stop _trying_?”

“No,” Pep snapped, getting his head up. He glared into Luís’ face. “No and if you think you can stop me, you’re a fool.”

At this point Luís just had to laugh. “You know why I kissed you? Because you wanted it. You could’ve tried to run, to get your own help, but you haven’t done that. You’ve stuck with me. I don’t have to stop you if you keep doing that.”

“You’re a faithless son of a bitch,” Pep spat out, and then dropped his head towards Luís.

The plane had just lurched, so at first Luís thought it was that. That could’ve gotten their mouths together. But then Pep’s hand came up and gripped Luís’ shoulder, and Pep opened his mouth and that wasn’t a goddamn lurch. That was hot rage and lust and Luís had a glorious armful of it. He pulled Pep in by the waist, splaying his hand over the man’s side and enjoying the feel of naked skin. Pep hitched up into Luís’ mouth, then groaned. His other hand slapped around in Luís’ shirt, then slid onto and down Luís’ chest, and _that_ was consent, by God.

Luís moved his hand to hook through Pep’s belt, then used the hold to drag Pep off his lap and into the space behind his legs and the wall. It broke the kiss and Pep twisted his head trying to get back at Luís. He finally got his mouth to Luís’ jaw and raked his teeth there, one hand rising to knot in Luís’ hair. He pulled so hard Luís craned his neck around and let Pep kiss him again, and Pep did that with the same intensity as he put into his stares. His other hand had stopped on Luís’ waistband, but now it yanked at Luís’ belt. Couple tries and Pep was flinging it somewhere while Luís tried to bundle the man’s frustratingly, beautifully long legs into the niche.

Finally the legs went up and Luís could get at Pep’s fly without spraining a wrist, but he’d just touched Pep’s hip when the other man abruptly shoved his hand down Luís’ trousers. He squirmed it around, got it under Luís’ underwear and had Luís’ cock before Luís had finished gasping in surprise. Luís grabbed Pep’s hip and just dropped his weight on it for a couple seconds.

The plane leveled out a bit and they slid towards the other end of the bench. Pep lost grip but his fingernails ran wildly over Luís’ prick in a way that almost made up for it; Luís yanked his head up, inhaled hugely, and then hissed as Pep latched his mouth to Luís’ neck. If Zinedine had told the pilot to do that, Luís thought, working at Pep’s belt with renewed effort, he was a dead amused Frenchman.

Luís got the belt off and Pep’s fly down, letting him feel over a triangle of blue silk. Pep arched under the petting, his eyes closing. He whipped his body and Luís started to rise, thinking he’d caught Pep’s bad arm, but then Pep snaked his leg out from under Luís and crooked it behind Luís’ thighs. He half-opened his eyes and stared up at Luís through his lashes, mouth wide open, lip trembling with every rasping breath.

After a long look, Luís put both hands on Pep’s waist. He got his fingertips under the man’s trousers and boxers, and pulled them down to the middle of Pep’s hips. Pep lifted those but instead of pulling the rest of the way, Luís ran one hand up the left side of Pep’s chest. The hips dropped and Pep closed his eyes again. Luís touched some sweat pooling in the hollow over Pep’s collarbone, then dragged his hand back down. He yanked Pep’s clothes off, fumbling his knees over the cloth when his own body got in the way, and then crawled up to suck at Pep’s mouth; Luís’ clothes rumpled down to somewhere about his knees and then he stopped thinking about them. Pep put his arm around Luís’ head and locked them together. Luís had no idea what the plane was doing now, and didn’t give a damn.

There was probably some kind of antibiotic cream around, Luís thought. Then, reluctantly, he put that aside. The way he wanted to fuck Pep right now, cream wasn’t going to let the man walk afterward. It wasn’t the time.

Not that he didn’t brush his fingers up behind Pep’s balls anyway, and tease around before dropping his hand to rub at the inside of Pep’s thigh. Pep broke their mouths apart and cursed Luís in Catalan and, oddly, Italian, shoving at Luís’ back with his calf. Luís kissed him back down and then held him there by pushing their pricks together with one hand. Could’ve used cream there too, the sweat wasn’t enough and it wasn’t comfortable, but at that point Luís didn’t really care about comfort. He cared about the tension that was pulling his skin in on itself to some point deep in his belly, he cared about the twist of Pep’s body under him. He cared about making Pep’s mouth go slack under his own, about feeling that tension snap away in a long, shuddering burst.

Barely a breath later, Pep clawed at Luís’ back. Luís lifted his head, puzzled in a dazed way, and Pep yanked his head aside and back so the point of his chin hit Luís in the mouth. He let out a series of gasps, each shorter and higher-pitched than the last, before seizing up and not breathing at all for a moment. His lashes fluttered and finally he slumped, sucking a huge gust of air into his mouth.

Luís eventually shifted off Pep to lean against the long wall. He remembered Pep’s arm and felt at it. The bandage had loosened but wasn’t off or bloody, and after a bit of one-handed fumbling, Luís got it on again. “That hurt?”

“Hmm? No, he gave me something for it,” Pep said. He opened and closed his eyes a few times, staring at the ceiling like he didn’t know what had happened.

Somebody knocked on the wall just outside the curtain separating them from the rest of the plane. “Hey, if you’re done, Albiol wants you to know it’ll be an hour and fifteen minutes, probably,” Villa said. He scuffed his feet. “You know, you could’ve turned on the fucking music or something. The controls are back there.”

“Tell Albiol thank you,” Luís said after a moment. He pushed himself off Pep and started looking around for something to wipe off his belly and legs. “And please fuck off before I use your head to turn on the music.”

Villa sputtered, mumbled something rude and then left. Pep snorted and Luís looked at him; the man was flushed for reasons besides their recent activity but then he laughed. It was short and a little rough, but it was a laugh.

“I don’t—I don’t normally come onto people I’m trying to persuade,” Pep said. He hiked himself up against the wall to his back. “That was just you.”

“I appreciate the compliment.” Luís located some paper towels he could get without having to leave the bench, and got them. He split the wad in two and handed half to Pep, who took them, then dropped them and grabbed Luís’ wrist. “Listen, Pep, I’m—”

“I do trust you. I just…I don’t really think I should. That’s why I keep asking questions.” Pep looked at Luís, then down at his hold on Luís’ wrist. Then back up at Luís, eyes completely unguarded and…somehow it wasn’t raw, the way they were open. They showed everything but it wasn’t against Pep’s will: he _wanted_ Luís to see everything, and was at peace with it. “But I think you’ll come out all right—you keep doing that so far, even though I’ve made it hard work for you. I should just stick to that.”

After a moment, Luís pulled his arm free and turned away. He kneeled up and pulled his trousers and underwear up, then swung his legs over the edge of the bench. “Where’s your bag?”

“I think they put it in an overhead bin,” Pep said, a little slowly.

Luís got up and poked his head past the curtain. Villa aside, everyone else didn’t look too disturbed. Silva wasn’t even bothering to hide his grin as he wandered up. “Put your client in a better mood?”

“If I’m fucking him, he’s not a client. I don’t sell that service,” Luís said deliberately. “You know where his and my bags are? Good, go get them for me.”

Then Luís ducked back behind the curtain.

* * *

Cesc and Robin got hustled up to the tower without a chance to eat dinner or even get some coats, and it was getting chilly now that the sun was down. The bastards didn’t even let them hold their own flashlights, which made trying to find the proper bits of architectural detail hard. “This would be a lot easier if we just did it in the morning,” Cesc muttered, squinting at some scratches on the wall. “It faces the sun and everything.”

“Well, we’re doing it now.” Deco looked at one of Cesc’s guards and the guard shoved Cesc so he knocked his shoulder into the tower. Then he turned to Ballack. “You get so friendly with them you’re worried about them now?”

Even in the dark, Ballack’s irritation was clear to see. “No. But I read their translations and there are traps on the outside, and I think it is very stupid to make them set them off, when they’re the ones who have to guide us. That’s what you said—that’s why we can’t hit them in the mouth, isn’t it?”

“Is this it over here?” Robin asked, interrupting the pending spat. He pointed to a spot on the side of the tower.

“Does it look like a fox?” Cesc shuffled over to the other man. Their feet weren’t tied but their hands were cuffed in front of them, and the ground around the tower still had tons of debris that shifted unpredictably underfoot. It wasn’t that easy for Cesc to keep his balance without being able to put out his arms, and the couple times he’d already tripped, his guards hadn’t given him a hand but had just watched him push himself back up. “Do you see the tail?”

Robin shrugged. “Maybe? It’s in the right place, but somebody’s scratched out part of it.”

Of course the scratched-out bit was the part that’d let them tell whether it was a fox or something similar like a dog. Cesc backed up and dug out his translation from his waistband, then checked the appropriate passage. “Huh. Well, if it is, then two meters over there should be some kind of statue.”

“Why don’t you go up and feel it?” one of their guards asked.

“Because somewhere around here is a trap called the…” Cesc twisted so the paper was in a flashlight beam “…the ‘crusher of the gate.’ I’m not really sure what sets it off but it’s supposed to guard the door.”

Deco called for the guards to bring up Almunia, who’d been lingering at the back of the group as much as he could. Almunia jumped, tripped on a pebble and nearly fell onto one of his guards. Looking disgusted, Ballack abruptly turned towards the tower and marched right up to the wall. He took his rifle off his shoulder and was stretching it towards the carving when Robin made an exclamation.

“What?” Ballack asked. He looked more at Deco than at Robin. “I’m here to see where there’s a risk and to deal with it, aren’t I?”

“He said there was a trap,” Deco said, not sounding particularly like he cared.

Ballack shrugged and poked the carving. When nothing happened, he stepped forward and felt at it. “Fox. There’s a bushy tail.”

“Um, so two meters that way and down near the ground,” Cesc said after a moment.

The other man obligingly measured it out, coming to a small pile of rocks. He kicked some of them out of the way, then frowned and bent down. After carefully removing a few more, he stepped back and pointed at the humped stone he’d uncovered. “It looks like a devil.”

“That’s about right. You’re supposed to pull it up or twist it up, something like that—it’s not very clear,” Cesc muttered, consulting his notes again. Then he heard rocks moving and looked up to see Ballack yanking at the statue. “Hey—hey wait, if that’s the door then—”

They all saw the statue suddenly jerk up a few centimeters. Thrown off-balance, Ballack stumbled back and then caught himself. He started to straighten, then looked sharply over his shoulder. Then he yelled, but Cesc had already heard the rumbling. He whipped around and saw the brush right at the edge of the cliff moving, and started moving back.

Somebody grabbed his arm and hauled him to the side. Cesc started to look to see who it was, but then glimpsed Robin falling over and twisted towards the other man. Luckily Robin fell towards him and Cesc was able to grab one elbow. He and Robin were teetering when a huge boulder suddenly rolled up over the edge, tumbled past them and smashed itself into the side of the tower.

Robin jumped even though they were a good meter and a half clear, and sent them to the ground. They writhed around for a couple seconds, Cesc trying to tell Robin that wasn’t Robin’s own knee he was pulling and Robin hissing to get off. Then somebody grabbed Cesc again, right under the arms, and put him roughly on his feet. They bent down and got Robin by the arms, and it turned out it was Ballack. Looking dusty but smug as hell as he finally turned towards Deco, who unfortunately hadn’t been squashed either but had leaped clear on the other side.

“It’s an old building,” Ballack said. “I don’t think they kept it up. If we’ve got that long a delay for each trap, they won’t be a problem.”

“Well, then you can go right ahead,” Deco snapped. He angrily ruffled his hair before flinging the chips of stone from it into the tower. “In…oh.”

That boulder really had smashed into the tower, revealing that at least part of one side wasn’t actually made of stone. Instead the builders had faked it with wood and artfully painted clay, which had broken easily before the boulder. Now, just past the curve of the boulder’s top, they could all see a dark chamber.

Cesc suddenly remembered his notes, only to realize he’d dropped them. He hissed and looked frantically around, then was about to scramble over to where he’d been standing before when somebody cleared their throat. When he looked up, Deco was holding out his notes with a look like it was dog shit.

“Well?” Deco said, as soon as Cesc had taken them back.

“So…so now we’ve got an antechamber and there should be some altar right inside, and also the ‘red furies of God,’” Cesc said.

Ballack had gone up to just before the opening and was shining his flashlight into it. “I see a big stone block. What are the ‘furies’?”

“Don’t know, doesn’t say.” Strictly speaking, that wasn’t totally true. The text didn’t lay it out for Cesc but ‘furies’ was a classical Greek myth reference and Cesc had a couple guesses about it. Probably something airborne, at least.

Robin slid Cesc a sideways look but didn’t say anything either. They just stood and watched as Ballack peered around, at one point almost sticking in his head. Then Ballack backed out, just as Deco was starting to fidget. He flicked Deco a contemptuous glance, ignored Deco’s jibe about losing courage and searched around till he had found a rock the size of a fist. He carried that back over to the opening, then flung it upwards into the room. It thudded into something—Cesc winced, thinking of the damage that would’ve done—and then another something made a whistling noise.

“Arrow from the ceiling,” Ballack noted. He swung his assault rifle around.

“Wait, don’t—” Robin yelped, stepping forward.

But it was too late. Ballack had already let off a round, and as Robin and Cesc looked on in helpless dismay, the bastard shot up a perfectly good site. Probably they weren’t ever going to figure out the trigger mechanism now—they’d be lucky if the arrow slits were left.

“Probably will do it,” Ballack finally said. He turned around and then raised his brows. “What, you wanted to see for yourself?”

“If they didn’t go off till you hit them, maybe you didn’t have to destroy the place,” Cesc told him angrily. “Don’t you guys have any respect for history?”

Deco gestured and some guards shoved Cesc in the back, while others cautiously started into the tower. “We have a lot of respect for it. That’s why we know it’s not dead, and that we can make our own.”

“Oh, my God,” Robin muttered, rolling his eyes.

Just before they pushed him into the antechamber, Cesc caught Ballack sharing that eyeroll. But then they were inside and Cesc had to look around and, well, wow. Their flashlights barely showed anything but what they did show was acres on acres of detailed mosaics: battle scenes, cities, strange symbols curling in between. In the dark the tiles rippled in the flashlight beams, making their figures almost seem to move.

“Nice.” Ballack walked up to Cesc’s left, dragging an awestruck Robin with him. He did take a decent look, but then he shrugged it off and turned to Cesc.

“All right, all right,” Cesc mumbled, getting out his notes again. Honestly, maybe they were philistines but it wouldn’t have hurt for them to let Cesc have a moment. “Okay, so there should be a knight with a banner.”

Robin was still getting to look all he wanted. Almunia wasn’t inside—Cesc looked outside and spotted the man with one of the few guards who’d stayed out there, probably hoping they’d all forgotten about him. Then somebody tapped Cesc’s shoulder and he turned around to see Ballack looking expectantly at him.

“I see three of those,” Ballack said, pointing them out.

“It’s the one with the banner that’s got seven crowns on it. They’re…um, gold on white. Somewhere behind it’s a room—hey, you don’t need to bash it! Don’t! There’s a button!” Cesc hissed, hearing Ballack move. He jerked his head up and sure enough, Ballack was holding that rifle in his hands like he was going to hammer the wall with the butt. Cesc bit down on his curses and scooted over to the man. “Okay, not a button, really, but there’s supposed to be this thing we can use to open it, and then that keeps the next trap from going off too.”

For a moment it looked like Ballack was going to bash the wall anyway, but finally he backed down. He heaved an impatient breath and cocked his head at the mosaic. “Then hurry up.”

“What’s the next trap?” Robin asked, coming over. He looked up at the knight on the wall. “One of those crowns is sticking out a little.”

Cesc nodded absently, only half-hearing Robin. It was really dark inside the room and the stupid guards kept shifting around, shining their lights everywhere but on the paper that was going to tell them how to get in. And they wouldn’t listen to Cesc either when he asked for some light, but just kept talking to each other and pointing at the mosaics—yeah, _now_ they were getting some culture. Finally Cesc had to go back near the door, and then an idiot guard thought he was trying to sneak out and grabbed him. It hurt but not as much as Cesc’s headache with just trying to get these assholes to understand simple logic: he needed to see to read, he needed light to see, so they needed to give him some light.

The guard eventually let him go and held up a flashlight for Cesc. It took a moment for Cesc to find where he’d left off in the notes, but once he had it and had finished reading that sentence, he stiffened. Then he whipped around. “Hey, don’t—”

Robin was over by the wall with Ballack, squinting up and giving directions while Ballack poked at the crowns in the banner. He looked over at Cesc just as there was a horrible grating noise. His eyes widened and he tried to get away from the wall, but Ballack got in his way as the other man started. And then that part of the wall spun around and suddenly they were gone.

“Robin!” Cesc screamed. He lunged forward but somebody got him from behind and held him back. He struggled away, kicking and twisting till he was slapped in the face.

The blow made him see stars. For a couple seconds he had all the light he could ever want. Then his sight slowly cleared, and his hearing came back too. He was breathing hard, maybe crying a little, and Deco was standing in front of him looking pleased.

“You’re right, I should just read your papers. I don’t really need you for that,” Deco said. “We didn’t need your friend after he showed us the points on the outside. And the only reason I’m keeping you is that I don’t trust you to write everything down. So if you were holding anything back in those—” he nodded at the notes “—you’d better be more careful now.”

“You bastard,” Cesc said. His throat hurt. He wanted to take his notes and ball them up, and cram them down Deco’s throat. The son of a bitch must’ve read part of them before he’d given them back; he’d known that wasn’t the way and he’d just let Ballack go because they had that shitty argument on, and then let Robin go too just because. “You bastard.”

Deco sighed and let his face go back to that fake sorrow. “Enough of that. Where’s the real door?”

Cesc looked down at his feet. His guard shook him, then pulled his head up by the hair. He hissed and jerked his chin, then twisted his head free. Then he pulled up his notes and looked at them. The words kept dancing for a couple more seconds, while Cesc tried to breathe without shuddering. “What about my other friends?” he muttered. “You gonna—”

“Depends on you,” Deco said.

Bastard, Cesc thought one more time. He felt snot dripping out of his nose and tried to suck it back in, then just let it be while he read his notes. He made sure to read the whole paragraph this time, and then he breathed out slowly. Cesc straightened up and looked around, then lifted his hands towards one of the other knights, one with a banner of red and yellow stripes. “That one. You press his hands.”

Deco looked at Cesc a little longer, then signaled for a guard. The man went over and prodded around at the mosaic for about a minute before part of the wall lifted up and away.

“Good,” Deco said. “Any traps?”

“No. Not till we get to the end of the hall back there,” Cesc said. He took another deep breath. “I’m telling the truth.”

“Good,” Deco said again. Then he went over and ducked into the hall, and his men dragged Cesc after him. The last thing Cesc saw was the white banner—only six gold crowns now. Six crowns and one hole where the other had been.

* * *

Luís finished doing up his shirt-cuffs and then leaned against the doorway, watching Pep rummage around in his bag. The other man had given up his suit for trash and was now standing in jeans and a half-buttoned white dress shirt while he tried to decide on a sweater. He pulled at a dark green one, then dropped it and pushed around a purple one. “Are you sure that that’s going to be fast enough?” he asked. “Can’t we just fly the whole way?”

“And land where? You said there’s enough room for a helicopter, but this is a lot bigger than that.” The nearest airport was in a tiny town several kilometers downhill of the site, and there was no real road to the site. “Look, you said it’d take them a long time to get inside even if they’ve got all the directions to do it. It’s only been a little more than a day.”

Pep looked up at Luís, three v-neck sweaters in his hand. Then he sighed and nodded, and tossed two of them back. The one he kept was a boring charcoal grey that probably would blend in well with the mountainside. “I know, I’m sorry. I’m just…I don’t like not knowing what’s going on. I keep thinking about everything that _could_ be happening.”

“Well, it probably is,” Luís said. When Pep shot him a horrified, accusing look, Luís shrugged but pushed off the wall and came over to stand by Pep. “That’s how he operates. If you want to know…”

“Have you—do you work with him a lot?” Then Pep backed off a little. He zipped his duffel shut and shoved it over the bench, then sat down and started working his bad arm into one sweater sleeve. “I thought you were a…a hired gun.”

Luís watched Pep hiss and inch his arm down into the sleeve. Whatever Silva had given the man didn’t seem to be long-lasting. “I am. But I do get repeat clients. He was one. He pays well and he seems to actually understand a mercenary is not a butler with a gun. Never made any stupid demands.”

“Oh,” Pep said. He stopped struggling with the sweater for a moment and just sat with his hands in his lap.

“I’m very good at what I do,” Luís said. “You don’t get that way by working for nice people.”

“Oh, well, I know. That is, I could guess. I just…well, never mind.” Pep gave himself a shake, winced, and then tried to pull his sweater over his shoulder. Since his shirt wasn’t buttoned, the cloth rumpled up under the sweater and he had to stop to pull it out. “Anyway, so what happens after we get there?”

After another moment’s watching, Luís sighed and put out his hands. The moment they got into Pep’s line of sight, he started sharply and jerked his eyes up to Luís. Then he looked guilty for the reaction but pursed his lips anyway, thinking about it. He decided and took one of Luís’ hands, and let Luís pull him to his feet. Then he started to say something, but stuttered to a stop as Luís pushed a double handful of shirt-tail into his jeans. His face flamed.

“Relax,” Luís said. He paused, hands still in Pep’s jeans. Then he chastely smoothed down the tails and took his hands out. The undone shirt-buttons were his next target; Pep didn’t jump again but his Adam’s apple bobbed hard when Luís’ fingers brushed his breastbone. “If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve done it this morning. No need to—”

“It’s not that. I told you, I trust you.” Pep put his good hand on Luís’ arm to get Luís to look up, and then left his hand there. Occasionally it’d squeeze to emphasize a word. “It’s just…well, I thought I knew him too. I knew he didn’t have the same, ah, philosophy as me when it came to conflict, but I thought he was…someone else. Otherwise I never would’ve introduced him around.”

Luís blinked. He absentmindedly let his hands slip, remembered what he was doing and did up the second button from the collar. That was probably high enough, so he moved onto the sweater. “So you’re why he was funding this dig in the first place?”

“I’m always going to regret it,” Pep said, voice stricken. He was staring at Luís but not really seeing him.

“Well, he can be very charming,” Luís said after a moment. 

That didn’t get to Pep, so Luís gave the man a little shake. Pep started and frowned, and Luís pulled the sweater over Pep’s head to belated cursing from the other man. Well and truly out of his funk, Pep moved his head all the wrong ways and nearly poked his finger up Luís’ nose trying to get his other arm inside. By the time they finally got the sweater down, Pep was flushed again and breathing a little fast. He dropped his arms on Luís’ shoulders and leaned on them while Luís tugged the sweater over his torso.

“God, I’m tired,” Pep muttered. His good arm slipped down over Luís’ back, then moved so he could get a grip on Luís’ third suit-jacket of the night. He was probably wrinkling the hell out of it but he leaned in and put his head on Luís’ shoulder, and his lashes fluttered like a butterfly’s wings. “I should’ve asked more questions.”

“He wouldn’t have told you anything and you would’ve had to really dig into his background to find something. I know you’re an archaeologist but I don’t think that that’s the kind of research you do.” Luís had gotten the sweater all the way down but he had to admit he didn’t want to move back. He had his hands spanning Pep’s waist and Pep was breathing in warm, gentle puffs against his neck. This was going to take some adjustment. “Well, most of the time.”

Pep snorted. He let his hand slide from Luís’ shoulder to Luís’ back, its fingertips sliding across the top of Luís’ shoulderblade. “No, usually I’m very boring. This project’s very extraordinary.”

Enough to get him snatched twice, Luís thought. “But I thought it wasn’t really your project.”

“Oh. Oh, well, it’s Wenger’s but I was helping him out. The El Siete myth spans Spain and France, so I guess you could say I took care of this side of the Pyrenees,” Pep said readily. “It’s faster than him applying for access to the same archives.”

“You did research for him? Can’t you get those anxious grad students of yours to do that? They seem competent enough,” Luís said. The plane began to tilt forward and he slowly backed up the step he needed in order to have the wall behind him. 

He took Pep with him and Pep seemed happy enough to go, lifting his head to show a bemused face. “Xavi really is something. He swears I’ve taught him everything he knows but I know I didn’t teach him some of those, because _I_ don’t know how to do them. But no, he was busy enough with my actual projects. Anyway it wasn’t much—it shouldn’t have been much, at least.”

“Hmmm?” Luís loosened his hold a little, letting some space open up between them. Then the plane banked into a turn and he had to pull Pep up tight against him to keep the man from falling into the wall by them. His side slid into something hard and he put his hand back to feel it out—one of those safety handles sticking out from the wall. He gripped it and used it to pull them back.

“I translated a few things from the royal archives. We all thought they’d be unimportant, more for confirmation than anything else, but it turns out one is actually quite critical,” Pep said once he’d gotten his balance back. Then he chuckled, bending his head so it bumped Luís’ shoulder. “You’re right, I shouldn’t worry. They can’t get in without that and they can’t possibly have it. I only let Wenger know about it the day before, and then Cesc called before I could mail it.”

He looked up at Luís, relieved and smiling. Except for the crow’s feet around his eyes, he could’ve passed for one of those over-capable graduate students of his, especially in those clothes.

Then he leaned forward, his eyes half-closing. Luís put up one hand to Pep’s chest and stopped him. He put his other hand into his pocket and found his hand-cuffs.

“What?” Pep said, pulling back. He studied Luís for a moment, frowning. “You can’t be—you wouldn’t be that callous—”

“No, I do like you a lot. But I thought you said they only wanted you because they thought you were trying to rescue this Cesc and the others,” Luís said. Inside the pocket he flicked open both cuffs, and then fitted them carefully between his fingers so they wouldn’t accidentally shut. “Do they know about this document they translated?”

Pep blinked, then furrowed his brow. Then he understood and his mouth dropped open a little. “ _Oh_. Oh—probably, yes. I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think of that, I was so busy—”

“Trying to make sure I rescued your friends. I can understand that.” The plane’s descent was getting steeper and Luís was running out of time. The problem was, he didn’t really want to do this to Pep. Because he liked the man, all right—enough to get him into plenty of trouble. But it was a little late to be ruing that. “That’s why they came after you again, instead of just killing you. And why they wanted you alive the first time.”

“I…I suppose. I don’t know…” Pep said uncertainly. He was staring hard at Luís; he’d figured out he hadn’t quite covered all his bases. Then he cocked his head. “Are you mad that I lied to you? Because at that point I didn’t know you’d help.”

Luís was surprised enough to laugh. Then he shook his head and didn’t quite miss how the tension uncoiled from Pep’s body. “What? No. Of course you were going to lie to me about that.”

“I’m not going to lie again. Not to you,” Pep said after a moment. He straightened up again and reached for Luís’ lapels.

By now Luís knew to look for that. He put his hands up to intercept Pep’s wrists and at the same time slid between Pep’s hands. He kissed the man, long and hard, making a hell of a lot of trouble. And snapped one cuff onto Pep.

It took a moment for Pep to notice, and by then Luís had already spun him around and pushed him against the wall. Pep gasped and stared at Luís with huge stunned eyes; Luís snapped the other cuff onto that safety handle. Then he rolled off the other man and got himself well out of range.

“It’s more that they’re going to come after you, or you’re going to think the only thing to do is to go down and get that thing before they do, and I can’t watch you and help your friends at the same time,” Luís said. He grabbed Pep’s duffel and slung it over his shoulder, then looked around to see if he needed to move anything else. “Albiol and a couple others are staying back here. They’ll keep an eye out, get you anything you need. I’ll be—”

“You fucking son of a _whore_ ,” Pep finally spat out. He jerked at his wrist and looked down at the rattle, as if he hadn’t been quite sure of the cuffs before. Then he abruptly lunged at Luís. His fingertips scraped Luís’ arm and Luís had to jump to get past Pep into the next compartment. “Luís! Luís! You bastard, you’re _not_ leaving me. This is—I’m not an idiot! I am _not_ going to do something stupid, I just need to know—”

Luís hurried down the aisle but couldn’t help looking back at the bang. He turned to find Pep curled around the doorway as far as he could go, eyes not just enraged but glassy: unseeing, incapable of rational thought. The man might not forgive him, Luís thought.

And then he realized he was fine with that. Pep didn’t have to forgive him—the stubborn, wonderful son of a bitch just had to live. The man was pure catastrophe. “We’re not having this argument,” Luís said, and then got himself into an empty seat near the front to the tune of Pep’s nearly incoherent swearing. He paused and set his shoulders, and then prepared to live with it. “Hell.”

“If it helps, a lot of our arguments go like that,” Morientes said. He was sitting next to Luís. “Then I calm down and that spiky moron figures out Raúl ties better knots than him, and it’s all right.”

Said spiky moron was in the seat across the aisle and had his face in his hand. “Shut _up_ or—”

“How long till landing?” Luís asked.

After a moment, Mata stopped watching with glee and tried to assume a sober expression. “Uh—”

The wheels bumped down onto the ground. From the back came some more thumping, but the shouting died down. Luís couldn’t help a wince, but he couldn’t worry about it now. “Pablo?”

“Make sure he’s okay but don’t let him out, and don’t let him scare Albiol into letting him out,” Pablo said from somewhere behind Luís. At least he sounded uninterested. “Got it. Have fun. Call if you’ll be late.”

“Good. Everyone else know what they should do? Where to go if they fuck up? How many years I’ll take off your life if you fuck up?” Luís stood up. The plane was still moving at a good clip but he had Pep’s bag and he didn’t need that. He put it into the overhead bin and then turned to take a rifle from Quique. “All right. Let’s go.”

* * *

The “tower” part seemed to be mostly decoration, because the path the texts charted out kept going down into the mountain. They went through narrow passages and down crumbling steps hacked straight out of the rock, everybody keeping an eye out for boobytraps. It got quieter and darker, and eventually even Deco had to let Cesc have a flashlight so Cesc didn’t trip and break his neck.

“God, I can’t wait to get out of here,” muttered one of Cesc’s guards. He shone his flashlight idly around, letting the beam skip here and there. A couple times he got Cesc in the eyes but ignored Cesc’s pained hiss. “I’m fucking starving.”

“What, didn’t you pack a snack?” said the other guard. A crumpling sound came from his direction. “Holy fuck, Maniche without food. This truly is a miraculous place.”

Both Cesc and Maniche looked over and found the second guard munching on what appeared to be an energy bar. The guard ate half in one bite, then shoved the other half into his mouth before he’d even finished chewing the first. He dropped the wrapper on the ground, blandly eyeing a jealous-looking Maniche. Then he frowned questioningly at Cesc.

“You shouldn’t just drop your trash wherever you want,” Cesc said under his breath, but to be honest he wasn’t really feeling it. He made himself look at his notes. “There’s supposed to be a thing on the floor. A carving of an arrow.”

Maniche started, then finally looked away from the other guard. He grunted and shuffled around, then abruptly whirled and kicked at the wrapper. “Goddamn fucking tomb. This had better be good, with all the trouble we’re going through.”

“You’re getting paid plenty for it,” Deco scolded. He came up to them, arms crossed, and stood watch while they reluctantly started searching the floor. Then he unfolded his arms and took another step towards Cesc. “Just how much further is it?”

Cesc started to look down, but the end of his flashlight snagged his handcuff chain, jerking his hand. His notes fluttered wildly and he thought he felt some slip out of his fingers, so he snatched at them. That wasn’t really easy to do with handcuffs on and then he still didn’t have a good grip on his flashlight either, which spun in his hands before suddenly dropping out of them. He made a grab for them but couldn’t see well enough in the dark and just snatched air.

The flashlight smashed onto the ground, blazing up before abruptly dying. The sound of it was incredibly loud and seemed to go on forever thanks to the echoes. And then somebody hit Cesc on the arm. “I’m sorry, but it’s dark in here!” Cesc hissed, twisting around. “I can’t—”

“What the fuck—” Maniche said. Then he gasped and gurgled and, well, didn’t sound so good.

“What is that? Oh, my God!” shouted somebody else.

All the flashlights swerved to the spot right next to Cesc, then broke up crazily just as something big and dark blurred away from Cesc. People started screaming and somebody let off a gunshot that cracked into the wall right next to Cesc’s head. He ducked down and scrambled back till he knocked into the wall. That made him lose his balance and he fell over onto one knee and his hands. He dropped his notes and reached for them, only to find that they were—below him? He looked down and suddenly realized the ground under him was _rising_.

“Where’s Fábregas?” Deco yelled. “Goddamn it, stop panicking! Kill it! Kill it and find him!”

“You kill it, you fucking little dictat—gah!”

Cesc jerked his head up and looked out over the hall. The square of rock under him was steadily going up and now he was about waist-height. It was hard to see, since nobody was pointing their flashlights the right way, but it looked like he was on one side of a divider that hadn’t been there before. All the shouting was coming from the other side of it, but the obstruction was too tall for Cesc to see over it.

He tried to remember what the hell the notes had said about this, but couldn’t. But it probably wasn’t good, so Cesc got to the edge of the square and got ready to jump down off the—pillar. He was on a pillar coming out of the ground. Down at the bottom he could see his notes flapping away.

“There he is!” Deco screamed.

Cesc looked up. Deco was pointing right at him. Then that thing that was between him and Deco twisted around and looked at Cesc and Cesc yelled himself. He threw himself back against the wall and the freaky cave monster snarled. It was huge and hairy and its eyes were red, and that was all Cesc saw before the rock behind him suddenly dropped away.

Screaming, Cesc tumbled back into some kind of tunnel. It sloped steeply downward, keeping him moving even though he was doing his damnedest to try and stop himself. He was thinking spikes at the bottom, or some giant abyss, or anyway _something_ nasty, and clawed desperately at the rock around him. His nails ripped and he could feel the rough ground tearing at his skin.

His foot caught on something. A second later it gave way, but he had long enough to kick out his other leg and connect with the side of the tunnel. That skewed him towards the walls and a couple seconds later he managed to hook a niche with his hands. The jerk was nasty and rattled his teeth, but he held on and breathed hard, and stopped sliding.

For a good five minutes, Cesc just stayed put and caught his breath. After that, he cautiously moved his legs around till he found places to put his feet. He tested them, found they were solid, and finally risked taking his hands off the side. Something warm was dripping down the side of his face. It was probably blood but he wanted to check.

He should’ve just let it go. As he reached up to feel his face, his arm struck rock and knocked him off his footholds. He went off sliding again, shrieking like hell, getting bruised and scraped all over till suddenly he was airborne.

_I’m dead_ , Cesc thought.

He fell through something hard and flat, and for a moment he wondered why it didn’t hurt. Then icy water went up his nose and _God_ , he was freezing. Freezing and underwater. He thrashed frantically, somehow found his way up to the surface and gasped for air. It was all he could do to keep his head up; the current was strong and he just had to let it carry him along.

Cesc had no idea how long he treaded water, or how far he went. Every time he tried to look around, he got water in his eyes. All he knew was that suddenly this huge thing loomed up in front of him. He thought it was another monster and threw up his arms to protect his face. He hit it pretty hard, but it sort of bent under him and then started to buck him off, and that was when he figured out he’d smacked into a bunch of branches. His handcuffs hooked on somewhere and then he grabbed a branch and got his feet into it. The water rushed up against his back, but it couldn’t push him through the wood.

From somewhere Cesc found the strength to pull himself up a little. He got his upper body out of the water, and then one of the branches under him broke. He dropped, got caught on the branches again and scrambled like hell. The cuffs kept getting caught and if it wasn’t those, it was his feet, but he kicked and squirmed and pulled, and finally got himself all out of the water. One of his feet touched something that wasn’t wood or water and he crawled sideways till he could get his foot all the way down. Then he got his cuffs off a snag, twisted around, and jumped.

He made the bankside squarely in a mud patch. It squelched nastily under him but Cesc really didn’t care. He dropped down onto his belly and arms, coughing. Then he threw up some water. Vaguely disgusted, he rolled to his side and then put his head down on the dirt. He was out.

Cesc raised his head, frowning. Was somebody setting off fireworks?

* * *

Luís hadn’t mentioned to Pep that Zinedine had arranged for helicopters to take them into the mountains, since going by jeep could have taken half a day. Hopefully nobody else told to Pep either, Luís thought. Then he snorted at his idiocy: a little thing like that was hardly going to make a difference now.

“Silva says he sees some tents up ahead. ETA one, two minutes,” Morientes’ voice crackled into Luís’ ear. “They’ll do a flyby to attract any fire and then we’ll jump when they start to swing around.”

“All right,” Luís said. Then he looked up front and saw Morientes curled around his seat, brows raised like he hadn’t heard Luís. Their headsets weren’t very good so it was possible; Luís gave the man a thumbs-up and Morientes nodded, turning back around.

In another few seconds Luís could see the camp from his seat. He took in the layout, then leaned back and looked at the men sitting across from him. Villa was fidgeting with the straps of his harness, while Mata was already on his feet and fiddling with the rappel lines. Albelda had his arms crossed and looked bored.

Their helicopter abruptly banked and Luís took that to mean that Silva was doing his fly-by . He looked out and saw the other copter zip by, then squinted down at the ground. The only light in the camp came from a handful of torches set up here and there, but Luís could just make out a figure running out of a shed-like building. Then he heard a burst of gunfire from the ground.

Morientes twisted out of his seat, his mouth open. He’d barely lifted his hand when Villa let out a whoop and damn near threw himself out of the copter and down the line. The man was the most gleeful diver Luís had ever seen.

Albelda should’ve gone next because Morientes had to get his gloves on, but Morientes insisted on going, apparently feeling outdone by Villa. Then Albelda and Mata went. Across the clearing, Luís could see dark figures dropping out of Silva’s copter.

Something hit Luís’ shoulder and he turned around to find Joaquín gesturing at him to take in the line. Luís checked to see that nobody was on it, then hit the spool to reel it in. At the same time, Joaquín turned the helicopter about and headed for a squarish spot of clear ground just next to the camp. It didn’t look like there was much opposition, so apparently they were going to try landing.

They touched down and somebody immediately cracked a shot into the helicopter. It harmlessly embedded itself into the wall, but Joaquín didn’t even turn off the engine before he piled out of the copter with a submachine gun, cackling psychotically. Luís had to scramble into the front and shut down the helicopter before he could exit.

As Luís jumped out, Silva’s copter roared by overhead, heading up the mountainside towards some kind of tower. The bursts of gunfire were getting closer to together, which probably meant that the guards all knew they were being attacked now. It also sounded like the shots were coming from the camp, which meant Villa’s insane friends were listening to Luís: they didn’t know where the archaeologists were being held so until they found them, they could only shoot in self-defense, and only when they were dead sure.

Joaquín running off left Luís without any cover and Luís sprinted for the nearest building, a metal prefab shed, with his teeth gritted. He was hoping that the man had at least drawn off any attackers on their side, and since nobody fired at him, it looked like that was true. It still didn’t mean Luís wasn’t going to tear a strip off Joaquín the next time he saw the man.

About a meter from the shed was a line of brush. It wasn’t very tall so Luís was gauging whether he could jump it when he spotted moving shadows in it. He changed direction and skidded through a break in the brush, then whipped around and got his gun up. His feet kept sliding till he had his back to the shed. “Move and I’ll shoot.”

Then he looked and…there was a whole bunch of them crouching in the brush. The tallest one had a big rock in his hand and was holding it like he’d meant to chuck it at Luís’ head, but one of the others had grabbed his elbow. “Do like he says,” the elbow-grabber ordered.

The beanpole looked disbelieving. “But we just—”

The elbow-grabber’s eyes flicked behind Luís, giving it away. He spun around and grabbed the arm of the kid about to get him from behind and—through a window. Luís stopped. They all were fairly young and not exactly dressed like mercenaries. “My God, I don’t even know why Pep’s so worried. You all seem fine at seeing to yourselves.”

“You know Pep?” said the elbow-grabber.

The kid in the window squirmed in Luís’ grip and from deeper inside came a pained grunt. “He could be lying!”

Then a gunshot hit the other side of the shed, making the whole thing shake. The kid in the window let out a little scream and jerked, and suddenly he was sliding out head-first. It was all Luís could do to catch him without accidentally shooting something, so Luís didn’t try for a nice landing. He just flipped the kid so he wouldn’t concuss himself and then let go.

“I’m _not_ lying,” he said, stepping back. “Pep’s ruined two of my suits making me come here and rescue you, and I’m doing that if I have to drag you all over my shoulder. He’s a complete nuisance.”

The kids looked at each other before the elbow-grabber nodded. “Yeah, he’s with Pep,” he said. Then he rushed up and grabbed at Luís’ suit lapels, eyes wide with a familiar craziness. “We broke the window but Bacary’s still inside! We have to get him out. And they took Cesc and Robin and Almunia up to the tower and you have to get them—”

Thankfully, his grip wasn’t quite as developed as Pep’s was. Luís pried him off, told him they’d start with Bacary and then studied the window while the kid from the window asked Bacary if he was all right. It was on the high side and the door was facing the fighting. And if some people were in the tower, Luís probably had to get moving now in order to get them.

He pulled out his walkie-talkie and told somebody to show up. After about three minutes, Mata whipped around one end of the shed. He heard the problem, glanced at the shed and then pulled something out of the duffel he was carrying. “Okay, we’ll just cut a hole,” he said, firing up his laser cutter. “Hey, you inside. Bang on the wall and then move left so I don’t hit you. This everybody?”

“No, we’ve got—just those three?” Luís asked, turning to the kids.

They nodded. Some of them were already edging up to Mata and admiring his cutter. “I’m Fran,” said the elbow-grabber. “Wow, that’s awesome. Is that custom or can you buy that?”

Luís’ walkie-talkie crackled, and then Quique came through, saying that they had most of the people in camp pinned down but a couple had gone for the woods. Luís told him and the others to secure the camp, starting with the shed where the kids were, and then left Mata to do his work. He slipped around the edge of the shed and spotted Morientes crouched behind a nearby tent. Morientes let off some covering fire while Luís ran over to join him, then dropped down and looked at Luís.

“Heard from Silva?” Luís asked.

“He said there were some guards outside the tower but they got them. One guy told them the group inside went hours ago and hasn’t radioed out for an hour and a half,” Morientes said. He changed the clip on his rifle, tossed the used one aside and then twisted around onto his knees, peering around the tent. After a moment, he let off a shot and somebody screamed. “Oh, but they said the guards had this Almunia guy who says he’s with the archaeologists.”

Luís nodded. So there were only two missing. But they were in that damn tower and Luís didn’t know what else was in there, and probably didn’t have the time to check. He sighed and dug out the keys to the helicopter, which he handed to Morientes. “He is. Tell Silva to get Almunia down to the rest of them. Quique’s in charge down here while I’m up there.”

“Can I ask you something?” Morientes tracked another target, then shot them. Then he pulled out his walkie-talkie and hailed Silva. “What do you think is worse, screwing up a security assessment or triggering an alarm during a mission?”

Silva came on and Morientes relayed the information while Luís just squatted there and tried not to have a headache. “Mori, just because I fuck somebody in your earshot doesn’t mean I’m going to give you relationship counseling.”

“Because I wouldn’t even have been in a position to trigger it if David had counted them right,” Morientes went on, like he hadn’t heard Luís. “My God, I didn’t do it _on purpose._ The last thing I want is to put Raúl in danger!”

Luís got on his walkie-talkie and told Villa, Joaquín and Albelda to head for the tower. Then he looked over at Morientes. The other man had a white-knuckled grip on his rifle and was pivoting his rifle around with one hand while he used the other to pull at his hair. “What did Raúl say?” Luís finally asked.

“He said he believed me when I said it was an accident, and also that anybody could fuck up the way David did, and that we finished the job so we should just figure out our mistakes and move on. I don’t know about that—about David fucking up—but anyway, David says Raúl’s being a martyr. A martyr! Because he won’t blame us! I think—”

“Raúl _is_ a martyr,” Luís said deliberately. Then he grabbed Morientes’ arm to keep the other man from turning his body towards him. “And if it was me, I would’ve told you both to go to hell for being so damn incompetent. But he’s not me, luckily for you, or else he’d probably point out how damn _stupid_ it is to fight over whose fault it was when neither of you look all that hurt but he was. Now tell me you said sorry to Raúl.”

Morientes shut his mouth halfway through his protest and looked stricken.

“I’m going to go yell at Villa and rescue some people now,” Luís said, letting go of Morientes’ arm. He pushed Morientes’ cheek so the other man looked forward. “Give me some cover.”

It took Morientes a second but he was professional enough to pull himself back together. He picked off another one while Luís darted over to the next tent. He probably wasn’t going to fall apart till he got back and had to face up to Raúl. Probably.

Luís made his way around to the side of camp facing the tower, where he met up with Albelda. The man was full of complaints about how Quique was organizing the attack but didn’t have the sense to look relieved when Luís told him he didn’t have to stay around for that. At least Joaquín showed up then, so Luís could fob Albelda off onto him and concentrate on getting up the mountainside.

They met Villa and Silva at the top. Silva said he’d turned his helicopter over to César and sent it to circle around since there hadn’t been enough room to land it. He’d kept Almunia around, apparently thinking that the man could help them figure out where the group inside had gone, but all Almunia could talk about was how two people had gotten swallowed up by a wall. He was so agitated that finally Luís let him lead them over to the spot to take a look.

The wall looked smooth except for a small hole in the mosaic covering it. Albelda poked into the hole with a stick but nothing happened. They also knocked and kicked at the wall, but got no response. By then Luís had gathered from Almunia that one of the two remaining archaeologists was one of the victims, and so he could see the point in trying to get the man out. But they didn’t have the equipment or the expertise, and they also had reasons to hurry: Mata had gotten the last kid out but the firefight down below wasn’t going to end any time soon. If they couldn’t secure the camp, then they needed to get out before their helicopters ran out of fuel.

“Take him down to the others and start ferrying them back to the airport,” Luís finally told Silva. He thanked Almunia, assured the man they’d work on getting this Robin out and then let Albelda and Marchena hustle him out. Then he looked at the wall again.

“I don’t know. It’s hard just to find the door seams,” Silva said. “And it feels solid. I think we’d have to blast it but if we don’t know what’s on the other side, we might hurt them.”

Luís weighed his options for a few more seconds, then sighed. “All right, we’ll have to radio back to the plane and ask Pep about it.”

“I’m gonna have to get the helicopter down for tha…what, it’s back already?” Silva frowned, then turned and went out as the whining roar of a copter approached.

Instead of following him, Luís stared at the mosaic. It was really a nice piece of work. If he wasn’t mistaken, it showed the moment when El Siete had reportedly used his secret power to split himself into multiple copies so he could personally lead all his armies into battle. Although the crest on his shield was wrong—the entwined letters in it were facing the wrong way. Luís touched it and felt it shift a little under his fingers.

He leaped back, jerking his gun up, and the wall swiveled halfway around, so that he could see a chamber behind it. Nothing came out of it.

A few seconds later the wall hadn’t moved any more. Luís had the others brace it to make sure, and then cautiously peered inside. The room was fairly small, not much bigger than a good-sized closet, but it was in an irregular shape. When Luís looked more closely, he realized that the walls had been angled so they looked joined when there was actually a space just wide enough for a person between them. The space led into an empty passage.

Luís came back out and waved Villa over. “Listen, I’m going in there. I’m just going to look for some sign that these people were in there and then I’ll be back out. If they were, then somebody’ll have to go get them because I’m going after the other one.”

“All right,” Villa said. “Just in case that door shuts again, how’d you get it open?”

“You press the letters on the shield like this.” Luís held up his hand to the wall just above the mosaic.

Villa nodded and handed Luís his flashlight. “If they’re there, you probably want Albelda and Joaquín to go after them. That’ll get Albelda away from Quique, and then we don’t have to worry about them arguing.”

That sounded reasonable, so Luís agreed. Then he went back into the passage. It was so narrow that he could barely move his arms from his sides, which would make it difficult to react quickly. He held the flashlight up but after several meters the light just dissolved without showing an end. Then he tilted it and it ran across the edge of a side-passage. At the same time Luís heard a soft scuffing noise. He slowly ran the light back, but didn’t see anything. “Hello?” he called out. “Is someone there?”

Someone answered, but it was very low and Luís couldn’t make out the words. He took another step towards the side-passage, so he could turn the flashlight’s beam down part of it. Still nothing but now he thought he could hear breathing. He walked till he was in front of the passage.

“Robin?” he called, lifting the flashlight. His beam hit a face.

* * *

It didn’t take long for Cesc to figure out that the noises were not fireworks but were coming from the campsite, but it was hard for him to get moving. As worried as he was for his friends, he was just so tired and achy. His legs felt like they were filled with lead and he’d barely gotten into the trees before he started to sneeze. It was a cold night and he wasn’t dressed for it, and now he was wet. Guaranteed cold, he thought. Then he shook it off and scolded himself for being selfish. His friends were facing a lot worse.

He did think about running away—not because he was afraid, but because he didn’t want to get caught again before he could get help. But in the end he figured he had to go to camp anyway. He had no idea where he was but if he at least saw where their camp was, he could figure that out.

Cesc had been hiking about ten minutes when a brilliant light flashed overhead. It blinded him and he couldn’t see what had made it, but he heard a loud thump-thump and knew it was a helicopter. The guards had probably heard about him and were out searching for him, so he dove for cover under a bush. The helicopter passed by him and he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he looked around and saw a jumble of rocks in a small clear spot. He got up and went over to it, trying to keep it between him and the sound of the copter. He didn’t want to get spotted but he wanted to know where the helicopter was going.

It didn’t take long for Cesc to see it, since the copter was going in circles. Also it looked different. It was smaller than the ones Deco’s men had used and differently shaped, looking more like the little choppers that news stations used. Then it swerved low and came right towards Cesc, its lights flaring into his face. He cried out and threw his arm over his eyes, then twisted around and stumbled frantically towards the trees. His foot caught on a root and he fell onto his hands and knees.

Cesc got back up as quick as he could, but he was still mostly seeing stars and he promptly tripped over something else. This time he wrenched his ankle and it hurt so bad that he couldn’t get back up. He rolled onto his side and grabbed at it, then gritted his teeth and shoved himself onto his knees. He started crawling.

There was a thump, and then somebody ran up behind Cesc. They grabbed at his back and he lashed out with his good leg, but missed. Then whoever it was hooked his handcuff chain and used it to pull him up onto his feet. His bad ankle buckled and he couldn’t even struggle; he just gasped like a landed fish while they threw him over their shoulder and started back. Then they got to some rope and they strapped Cesc to it. By then he had fought down the pain enough to try kicking again, but the rope suddenly jerked him up out of range. He was getting hauled up into the copter. “You bastards!” he shouted. “I hate you, you fucking sons of whores. I hope you all get fucking speared or smashed or whatever the hell’s in that tower, and I hope—”

Then he was in the copter and being dragged over the floor. A second later, the man who’d grabbed him pulled himself in and shouted for the pilot to get moving. Then he reached for Cesc and Cesc lashed out with his arm.

Somebody else caught his wrist and stopped him. Cesc turned to look at them and then froze.

* * *

Luís recognized the face. He immediately dropped his flashlight and dove for the ground, so that the knife narrowly missed him. Then he rolled back behind the edge of the passage’s opening. “Paulo?” he called out. “Paulo, it’s Luís.”

“No, you’re fucking not,” came the shaky, hysterical answer. Paulo had moved up and was fumbling with something that clicked. “You’re fucking not. Nothing in here’s real. It’s all a—”

“Ferreira, goddamn it, it’s me!” Luís got off the ground as quietly as he could. He’d held onto his gun and he edged that out in front of him. “It’s me. Don’t make me come over there and prove it.”

For a moment all Luís heard was Paulo’s ragged breathing. Then Paulo moved and knocked up against the wall. He sounded like he was still in the side-passage. “Luís?”

“Yes?” Luís replied. He shifted closer to the wall and glanced behind him and ahead of him. His flashlight had rolled out of reach and was pointing back the way he’d come, but enough light was spilling back for him to see…some very ugly carvings on the opposite wall. They showed writhing monsters surrounding a huge reptilian head whose sightless eyes were looking straight at Luís, mouth open in a fanged snarl. The head took up most of the wall. “Paulo, are you by yourself?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I think so. I think it _ate_ them,” Paulo whispered. “It ate Maniche.”

Luís checked the wall on his side. It didn’t have any carvings. He had no idea if that was important, but he decided he’d rather look at it if he had to look at any of this place. “What did? Where were you? Is it nearby?”

“No. I don’t _know_ , I can’t see, I just ran!” Then Paulo gasped for air. He abruptly moved so that Luís glimpsed part of his body, then disappeared back into the dark. “I just ran. What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t working for us now.”

“I changed my mind,” Luís admitted. “But listen, I don’t think there’s any reason for you to keep working if everybody’s dead. So why don’t you and I go outside, where there’s some light, and—”

An odd snuffling sound interrupted Luís. He jerked up, thinking it was Paulo breaking down, and Paulo screamed and ran into the passage. Luís yanked himself around, trying to track the other man, but Paulo wasn’t even trying to come at him. The man was running from something else, something behind him.

Paulo was staring in horror that way when he rammed into the carved head. He lost his footing and started to fall, then was jerked up by something that grated loudly. Then Luís noticed that the head was sticking out more from the wall then it had before. He took a step back, not quite believing it.

“You’re not real!” Paulo shrieked. He was struggling, one of his arms apparently trapped against the wall. The whites of his eyes were showing. “You’re not real! You’re just like the thing that ate Maniche!”

The head abruptly wrenched out of the wall. Its jaws ratcheted apart and forward so they were caging in the desperate Paulo. Luís suddenly realized he was just standing there and started forward to help the other man, but Paulo whipped around and pointed a gun at Luís’ face.

“You’re not real!” he shouted one last time.

Just as he pulled the trigger, the stone jaws moved and sent his arm up. Nearly at the same instant Luís ducked. The shot nicked Luís’ shoulder so he staggered towards the opposite wall. Then he cursed and whirled away from it, trying to keep his head down. He grabbed at his shoulder and felt ripped cloth but no blood.

Paulo’s screaming peaked and then was cut off sharply. Luís looked up, still stumbling, and didn’t see a speck of the other man. The snarling head had withdrawn back into the wall and was nearly back to where it had been, and something else had come into the passage. Its head almost touched the ceiling, its eyes were red and what Luís could see of its raised forelimbs consisted of wicked-looking claws.

Luís instinctively jerked his arms up, aimed between the eyes and fired. The beast lurched, making that snuffling sound Luís had heard earlier, and then tumbled heavily into the carved wall. The grating noise started up again and Luís spun on his heel to get the hell out.

Except that he couldn’t. Another stone head had come out of the wall behind him and was blocking his way. He could see between its jaws, which weren’t just opening up but were also turning _towards_ him. He took a step back, then spun on his heel and found out two things: the thing he’d just shot was gone, and the stone head on that side had come out again and was twisting in his direction.

“The tongues!” someone said.

Luís jerked back around just in time to see a dark blur with a bright spot hurtle through stone jaws. An ear-piercing squeal filled the air, making Luís duck his head to cover his ears. Whatever had come at him hit his elbow, skewing him about, and then knocked one of his ankles out from under him. He dropped roughly to one knee and blinked.

Pep reached into the other stone head, hit something with the end of his flashlight, and the grating noises stopped. The squeal went on for a few more seconds, then ended as well and Luís slowly realized that the stone heads had stopped moving, their maws frozen in a menacing gape. He also was holding his breath; he let that out.

“There,” Pep muttered, clambering out of the stone mouth. He put his hand on an upper fang, then jerked it away and looked at it. Some kind of dark sticky stuff was on his fingers, but he just grimaced at it before he came over and looked down at Luís. He was breathing hard. He wiped his hand off on his jeans and Luís saw that that wrist was heavily bruised. “You goddamn _fool_.”

Luís didn’t have enough spit to talk the first time he tried. He coughed to the side, then looked up, grinning. “Thank you very much, Pep.”

“I can’t believe you—you.” His ranting dying in a stutter, Pep just stood there and frowned at Luís. “What?”

“I said thanks,” Luís said. He got up, checked that he still had his gun, and then started looking for his flashlight.

Then he looked up, because more people were coming. They paused at the first stone head, then muttered softly and crawled through: Villa and another man, who looked like he’d been dragged through thorns by wild horses. “You all right?” Villa asked. Then he poked at a fang. “Guess we don’t have to look for them after all.”

“No, we do too!” the other man said indignantly. He pointed to the fangs. “Look! Totally dry, no blood. And the other’s wet from just now. They didn’t eat _Robin_.”

“Oh, ah…” Pep made gestures “…Luís, Cesc. Cesc, Luís.”

At that Luís took another look. So this was the kid who’d gotten Pep into this whole mess. Young, bright-eyed and probably running on sheer adrenaline by this point, from the spastic way he was bouncing on his feet. “So that’s just Robin left, then?”

“Cesc said he fell into a tunnel and got washed out by a mountain stream. We spotted him and picked him up,” Pep said. Then he twitched. He spun around and grabbed Luís’ left arm, his flashlight jabbing into Luís’ stomach. “What the _hell_ do you think you were doing? You were going to just make me sit and wait, and go off and do your—”

Luís shoved his gun into its holster and then grabbed Pep back. He shook the man, ignoring Cesc’s startled protest, and waited for Pep to stop talking. Then he let go of one arm and used the other to spin Pep to face the tunnel. “All right, where does this go? We still need to find this Robin.”

“It goes to the burial chamber,” Pep said. Then he remembered they were fighting and tried to pull his arm away. “Listen, you can’t just—”

“Do you know how to get us there without setting off more of these things?” Luís asked.

Pep stared disbelievingly into Luís’ face. He glanced down at Luís’ grip on his arm, then yanked his head back up when Luís started forward. “Yes, but you _left_ me—and when I goddamn told you I was the only one who _knew_ —”

“Look, we can’t have this argument now because we need to find Robin. _He_ doesn’t know how these traps work, does he?” Luís said sharply. “Then the longer we stand around here, the more likely it is that he’ll run into one.”

It was a close call, but finally Pep’s humanitarian instincts won out. He pressed his mouth into a thin line, but shook his head. Then he raised his free arm and pointed at the side-passage. “Down that way next. This hall should dead-end after another twenty meters.”

“Wait a minute,” Villa said. “What happened to a different team going down?”

“That was when I thought we’d have to go in different places. If they’re all heading in the same direction, then we don’t have to split up. Also, Paulo said that the group that went down here scattered and some of them were possibly eaten by this thing—”

Cesc did a little fist-pump next to Villa.

“—so I think now it’s more about speed than numbers,” Luís finished. He tried to wipe away a trickle of sweat at his temple and only then noticed he was still holding onto Pep’s arm. He let go of it and stared at the arm for another moment. Then he shook his head and looked back up at Villa. “How are things down at camp—wait, if you’re here—” he pointed to Pep “—then who’s guarding the plane? And how did you get here?”

“I explained to Raúl why it made more sense for me to come and he listened,” Pep said, more than a little sarcastically. He was holding his bad arm and staring with intense accusation at Luís. “We took a helicopter. That you didn’t tell me you’d rented.”

Villa frowned. Then his face cleared. “ _Oh_. Albiol. Yeah, he can’t take much yelling these days.”

“Pablo’s still there. We had to lock him in the cockpit but Raúl said he should’ve gotten himself out pretty soon afterward,” Pep added matter-of-factly. “Anyway, aren’t all the gunmen up here?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we leave people behind,” Luís sighed. He knew he should’ve paid more attention to who Villa was picking for back-up duty. “Well, we can’t do anything about that now. The camp?”

“We’ve got about a third of the people out but there’s still a bunch of assholes shooting at us and they’re not really budging. Quique says that he saw Carvalho and thinks there are Argentines, too.” Villa scratched at his chin. “He wants to know if you’ll be much longer. He doesn’t want to get bogged down.”

Luís tried to ignore Pep’s staring while he thought all that through: there were still a lot of unknowns—for that matter, the further he got, the more unknowns he was finding out existed—but they couldn’t leave the job half-finished. Especially now that Pep was loose again, and not likely to let down his guard enough to allow Luís to knock him out. “Tell him that once all the grad students are out, he can scale down a skeleton crew and retreat up here. Then he has to stay put till we come back up.”

It was obvious Villa didn’t like the plan but he didn’t raise any objections past a disgruntled mutter. He got out his walkie-talkie and relayed the new plan to Silva, who promised to tell Quique. Then he lowered the walkie-talkie and looked at Luís. “Well, so me and who else? Albelda?”

“No, Silva. Albelda and Joaquín can wait for Quique,” Luís said. Then he rolled his eyes at the horrified face Villa was pulling. “Don’t get hysterical. If anyone’s going to stay to make sure Quique’s around for the bitter end, it’ll be Albelda. Is Albiol still there with his chopper?”

“He’s circling but wants to go back,” Villa said after a moment. “You do know that the moment Quique _does_ show up, it’s all going to go to hell? And you want them to be our rear guard?”

“Villa. There are stone heads eating people here.” Luís knew the man had seen that and gave him a moment to remember it. “Whatever the hell those two do when they’re together, it’s not as crazy as that.”

“Whatever, you’ve never seen them drunk,” Villa muttered, but he went ahead and told Silva what Luís had said.

While they waited for Silva, Luís attempted to examine the passage they were about to take. He asked Pep to borrow the man’s flashlight, since his own had apparently gotten eaten, but Pep refused to do more than shine it for Luís. It was annoying and, to be honest, unusually petty for Pep, but Luís didn’t waste time thinking about it.

“How far away is the burial chamber?” Luís asked.

“…it pasted into the boards of a book of hours, believe it or not,” Pep was saying to Cesc. He looked over when Luís spoke, but had think about whether he’d answer. “Not that far. If you know the way it’s fairly straightforward. All the other passages are there to confuse people.”

Cesc snorted. “Sure confused me. I guess it’s a good thing I got flushed out, otherwise God knows where I would’ve ended up.”

Luís had forgotten about Cesc. He started to tell Villa to run him back up, but Pep cleared his throat. “Cesc’s staying,” Pep said firmly. “He knows Robin the best, he’ll be able to help us figure out what Robin probably did along the way.”

“But he looks exhausted,” Luis said, starting to lose his temper.

“I’m okay, I had some energy bars in the helicopter—”

Pep narrowed his eyes. “You said we should each handle our own specialty. Well, you don’t know anything about ancient buildings and we do. We’re the archaeologists.”

“He fell into a stream and needs dry clothes and a doctor. You wanted him safe, didn’t you? I don’t see why we went through the trouble of helping you rescue him if you’re going to let him die of exposure,” Luís snapped.

“—and I changed my clothes, too! I’m dry! I can walk! My ankle’s kinda sore but turns out I probably didn’t even sprain it—”

“You just want to get us out of the way because you have control issues and you can’t see past them to fucking _sense_ ,” Pep retorted, prodding Luís in the chest with one finger. Then he smacked away Luís’ hands. “Oh, no, you are _not_ shoving me away again! You’re a professional mercenary! You have lots of guns and friends with more guns! Fine! But you’re complete shit at being reasonable! That might work when you’re kidnapping innocent people but you’re not doing that, you’re trying to find something in a booby-trapped building when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing! What’s professional about that! That’s just fucking stupid!”

Villa sighed heavily, and then managed to look surprised when both Pep and Luís whirled to glare at him. He hunched his shoulders and jutted out his chin. “Listen, if you’re going to have a fucking domestic, you want to do it some other time? Because it’s not very helpful either.”

“Oh, like you’re qualified to talk when the first time we met, you were having a spat about probably illegal activity in front of complete strangers,” Pep snarled.

“Shut the fuck—” Villa started, raising his fist and starting forward.

Luís’ arm shot out. He grabbed Villa’s wrist and forced it down. After a moment, he let it go and then stepped back. “Not the time. Look, let’s just go and get this over with.”

“Right, side with your new fuck,” Villa mumbled.

That was enough. “Villa, you _don’t_ have room to talk. You fight so much with Mori that you two probably wouldn’t notice if somebody snatched Raúl right in front of you. You know what that makes him? It’s sure as hell not an equal with you two, since you don’t give a damn how he feels so much as how injured your pride is.”

“I—wait, that’s not—I—” Villa stammered, eyes wide.

Then he fell silent and just stared at Luís. They all just stood around, stewing, and when Silva hopped in behind Villa, Luís damn near shot the man out of surprise.

“Uh, so…I miss something?” Silva asked, looking curiously around.

“Just me wondering if it’s too late to get rescued by somebody else,” Cesc said under his breath. Then Pep shifted and Cesc looked up, shaking his head and hands in a panic. “Kidding! Kidding! No, really, I’m seriously grateful because those guys were assholes. But um, can we find Robin now?”

“That way.” Pep pointed stiffly. Then he pivoted on his heel and started walking without looking to see if anyone was following.

Luís swallowed his irritation and waved at the others. Then he hurried after Pep. The man might be a complete pain in the ass, but if Luís had learned anything from this trainwreck, it was to not let Pep out of his sight.

* * *

Pep at least had been telling the truth when he’d said the burial chamber wasn’t that far. He also kept them from running into anything else like the stone snakes. Occasionally they’d hear distant scuffs and moans, but none of those materialized into anything that needed shooting. Unfortunately, they also weren’t this Robin, which meant they had to go the whole way to the burial chamber.

“This should be it,” Pep finally said, after the wall had opened up. He raised his flashlight over his head and shone it into the dark.

The next chamber was a lot bigger than the narrow hall they currently were in, that was certain, but it was hard to make out anything else. When Pep started forward, Luís caught the man’s elbow and then nodded to Villa and Silva. They edged forward, guns out, the one holding up the light while the other went ahead.

“Get off.” Pep twisted free and stepped inside before Luís could stop him. He only went a few steps before he bent down and examined something.

Luís gritted his teeth and gestured for Cesc to follow him, then made his way up to Pep’s side. “Look, I understand why you’re upset, but you need to remember that there are dangerous men—”

“Oh, I don’t think I’m going to forget that,” Pep said with a look at Luís. Then he squatted down next to an engraving on the floor that was apparently interesting. “And frankly, I don’t have much faith in your ability to understand right now.”

“For God’s sake, it’s not like I ever declared my undying love for you,” Luís snapped. “And you knew from the start what kind of person I am. I might’ve kidnapped you from the library but I wasn’t holding a gun to your head when you said you wanted my help.”

Pep went still. Somewhere behind them, Cesc let out a slow hiss. Then Pep slowly twisted on his feet to look up at Luís. His eyes were darker than the room around them and were glittering with barely-restrained anger. “Do you _honestly_ think this is some kind of—of lovers’ spat? Well, understand _this_ : I’d be upset even if we hadn’t slept together, because it’s not about that. It’s about you just having the common decency to see that you are not the most brilliant man in the world and that other people besides you _sometimes_ know better.”

“We’re not having this argument now,” Luís said, turning away. He’d just heard Villa hiss that it looked clear and he was going to light a flare for more light. He didn’t think that that was a good idea, given the lack of ventilation and intended to tell the man so.

But before he could, Pep shot to his feet and seized Luís’ elbow. “We are _absolutely_ having this argument now. See, there you go again, acting like nobody has anything worth saying except—”

“Me.”

Pep’s slight inhale had already made Luís start to turn. He froze, gun halfway up; Pep’s fingers tightened sharply on Luís’ arm but he didn’t make any sound or try to pull away.

From across the room came a hiss and then a garish red flare. It quickly settled into a steady white halo that surrounded Villa, who was looking back over with first confusion and then a rigid sort of dismay. Silva was next to him but had his back to Luís and Pep and didn’t immediately sense the problem. When he did, he jerked around, gun first, and Luís barely had time to signal for him to stop. Then Luís slowly turned around.

“Well, I see you haven’t completely lost your senses,” Deco said. He’d come up from behind and had jammed an assault rifle into Pep’s side.

A few meters away, another man Luís didn’t recognize had Cesc at gunpoint as well. Both of them were covered in scratches and the whole left side of Deco’s face was crusted over with blood, but his eyes looked clear enough. “Deco. You know, if you’d just sent somebody with a sense of humor—”

“Tell your men to put their guns on the floor,” Deco ordered.

“—then again, I don’t think you’d recognize a sense of humor if it kissed you,” Luís muttered, but he obligingly gestured to Silva and Villa.

They didn’t like it, but they obeyed. Then they took a step back from the guns, keeping their hands out.

“Do you have any idea what you’re dealing with?” Pep asked.

Luís recognized that particular strain of suppressed outrage. He tried to put out his hand to stop Pep, but Deco saw the movement and jabbed the rifle’s tip at Pep. “No, you back off. Put down your gun.”

“Deco,” Luís started.

Deco heaved a sigh, but instead of following it up with a complaint, he yanked Pep back a good meter. Then he forced Pep down on his knees and had his man do the same to Cesc. “Oh, no. I am not taking any more of your _bullshit_. You think you’re so goddamn unflappable, well, you haven’t had to deal with half of the fucking shit I’ve had to in the past couple days. And I’m done. I’m so done. I’m getting this goddamn thing and getting out, and you can’t stop me.”

“I wasn’t going to try,” Luís said. He slowly put his gun on the floor, then just as slowly straightened up.

Both Deco and Pep shot him incredulous looks. Then Deco snorted and pointed his assault rifle at the back of Pep’s head. “Right. And you’re just here to take in the sights.”

“Look, Deco, let’s just get to the point. You want to finish up your job—great, that’s great. But that means you’ve got to find this artifact and get it out of here, and I can assure you that you’re going to have a problem with the second one, if not both.” Luís couldn’t look at Villa and Silva without taking his eyes away from Deco and Pep, and he was taking Deco’s threats seriously. He might disagree with Deco on how to do their respective jobs, but he wasn’t going to pretend the man wasn’t very dangerous when he chose to be. So he was just trying to keep Deco’s attention on him while hopefully Silva or Villa figured out something. “First you’d have to get out of here, and considering how hard it was to get in, that’s not going to make your day any easier. Second, you don’t have transport.”

“I don’t?” Deco said. He sounded confused and looked confused, but Luís knew better to buy that particular sob-face. “How’d you come up here? Don’t tell me you walked—you would show up to a mountain fight in Italian shoes, but come on.”

“Just why are you bothering?” Luís asked, trying his best to sound conciliatory. “This has been a complete disaster for both of us. Crazy archaeologists running around, killer ruins, God knows what else…and for what? Some artifact that might have magical powers? Why don’t we all just call it a day and go back out, and I’ll drop you off in town? I won’t even blame you for sending that second team.”

Pep looked like he had a lot he wanted to say to that, but for once his commonsense overcame his need to express himself and he stayed silent. He grimaced as Deco prodded him with the rifle, then hissed as Deco decided to give his bad arm a kick. He went ashy and he had to jerk his knees apart, but his pride kept him from sprawling on his face.

“Nice try,” Deco said. Then he paused, taking in Luís’ aborted step forward with knowing amusement. “Well, I always knew that that arty taste of yours was going to get you into trouble.”

“Deco, you’re just doing this because you’re terrified of coming back empty-handed,” Luís snapped. “If you had any balls, you’d just face up—”

“I _am_.” Deco jerked up his foot.

Pep grabbed his arm and hunched over in anticipation, but Deco stopped his foot just short of hitting him. After a good look at Luís, Deco slowly swung his leg around and back. He jerked his head over his shoulder.

“You’re going to get it for me, and then we’re getting out of here,” Deco ordered.

Nothing from Villa and Silva’s corner, and to be honest Luís wasn’t certain now if the risk would be acceptable. He pressed his lips together.

“I’m the one who knows how you can take it out safely,” Pep suddenly said. He put back his shoulders and carefully twisted his head to look up at Deco. “If you don’t do it right, you don’t just risk dying—you risk having El Siete’s treasure be buried forever.”

“Well, then you can tell him how to do it.” Deco smiled nastily. “I’m tired. I don’t really want to deal with you, Luís. So you can get busy getting that damned thing, and I’ll just stay here with the professor.”

Luís muttered a sarcastic thank-you. He looked at Pep and Pep stared back, still breathing hard from Deco’s kick. It was hard to read Pep’s eyes—or rather, it was easy to read them but hard to understand them. The man looked calm and settled, mind made up.

“See that stone block over there?” Pep pointed to the right with his good arm. “That should be the casket of El Siete. You can go over to it but don’t touch anything unless I tell you to.”

After another moment, Luís reluctantly turned around. He glimpsed Villa and Silva, who were still across the room, in the same position as the last time Luís had looked at them. Then he saw the block Pep was talking about and cautiously went over. It was several times bigger than a modern coffin and was covered in a mosaic. A stone dragon curved over each corner.

“You’re going to have to open it,” Pep said.

Luís looked back and Pep nodded, looking just as unhappy about that as Luís was. Then Luís turned around and eyed the massive lid. It was stone, of course, and at least as thick as his palm.

“There’s a trick to it,” Pep continued. “Look at the top—no! Don’t step on it! I didn’t tell you to touch that!”

Even at gunpoint, Pep was still a martinet. Luís suppressed his sigh and obligingly put his foot back on the floor.

“The top should have a sword carved out of it.” Pep’s voice stuttered a little on the last part. Then he hissed something and Deco told him to hurry it up. “You pull on the sword’s handle.”

“I can’t reach that from here,” Luís said over his shoulder.

Pep was silent for a few seconds. “Okay, I think you can go around to the left end. Don’t step on anything sticking out from the base of the casket.”

That was easier said than done, with the extensive ornamentation that decorated it. Also there wasn’t much space between the dragon on the corner and the wall, but Luís did as Pep said. He remembered the stone heads earlier and held his suit-jacket away from the dragon’s open mouth. Then he slid in between the wall and the sarcophagus as far as he could. From there he could stretch out and just get his fingers under the stone sword’s handle.

“Pull up,” Pep said.

Luís couldn’t get the angle for that, so he just pushed from the bottom. He couldn’t get much leverage and the sword didn’t move at all.

“I don’t actually need the grad student, do I?” Deco called out. “And he’s been a complete pain to deal with.”

“You touch a hair on Cesc’s head and—” Pep’s pained swear quickly melted into a long, shuddering breath.

Luís resisted the urge to look over and concentrated on the damn sword. He pulled back his arm and rocked onto his heels, eyeing the handle. Then he lunged forward, smacked up the handle as hard as he could, and pulled himself back. He barely missed hitting the dragon with his arm, but he heard the grind of stone-on-stone that meant success.

His overextended back and arm were on fire. He grabbed his knees and bent over till that had faded a bit before he looked up. By then the grinding noise had ended.

The top of the casket had pivoted about forty-five degrees so both ends were open. “Get on the edge,” Pep said. “Try not to grab the lid.”

“Try or don’t?” Luís said back.

“ _Don’t_.” Pep cleared his throat. “Don’t fall in either.”

Luís nodded tightly. He straightened up a little, measured the distance with his eyes and then leapt. He made it easily enough, but his soles didn’t really have the necessary traction and they slid. Hissing, Luís threw his weight back and caught the edge on his heels, then windmilled his arms desperately before he glimpsed the corner. He skidded his right foot onto it, then dropped into a crouch and pinched the edges with his hands. His balance still wasn’t that solid, but he could work with it.

Then he looked down. Unsurprisingly, there was a skeleton inside. It had a gold crown on its head and plenty of other jewelry sprinkled around it, and a rusty suit of armor encasing what was left of its body. “El Siete, I take it.”

Deco laughed. “Crossing yourself? Bit late for that, isn’t it?”

“It’s not for me, it’s for him,” Luís muttered, since he had more than an idea of what Pep would tell him to do next.

Sure enough, Pep told him to look at the skeleton’s hands. They were clasped to the breast around a sword and a squarish box covered in gold filigree. Pep directed him to pry both objects away from El Siete, starting with the box. In order to reach them Luís had to gingerly slide around the edge of the casket, and even then, he could only use one hand at a time. When he got the box free, he pinched it between his knees and his lap, and then worked on the sword.

The box had been easy, since it’d just been lying between the sword and the skeleton’s breastplate, but the skeleton’s fingers were actually curled around the sword’s hilt. And for some reason their grip was still tight, even though Luís honestly could not see what the hell could let them even have a grip. He finally ended up having to peel off each finger separately.

It was slow going, made even slower by the fact that he had to stop every few seconds and adjust his balance. He could hear Deco shuffling impatiently around in the background and occasionally threw off a comment about his progress over his shoulder, but Deco didn’t respond aside from irritated grunts.

“You’re playing around with some very dangerous things,” Pep said tightly. “If you misuse that, the consequences won’t just be on your head. It’ll be on the whole world’s. And it’s very easy to misuse it. The legends say El Siete’s death came about because he got overconfident and started to think he could do whatever he wanted with it. But he—”

“Save the history story for your students,” Deco snapped.

At that point Luís was on the last finger. He put his hand down and got the box, and then wrapped his other hand around the sword. Then he heard a blow and Cesc’s gasp, and he twisted around without thinking.

The sword lifted a bit, then jerked to a stop. For a moment Luís wobbled wildly on the casket’s edge. The box slipped out of his hand; he cursed but let it go and grabbed for the edge. But he was too late—his balance shifted and he fell into the casket.

“Luís!” Pep shouted desperately. It was the last thing Luís heard.

* * *

All Cesc knew was that that bastard Deco had kicked Pep again and Pep was falling over, and then Figo fell into the sarcophagus, and _then_ all hell broke loose. Pep was screaming like a madman, scrambling on his hands and knees towards the sarcophagus and not even looking at Deco, who’d just hefted his rifle like he was going to shoot him.

Cesc couldn’t let that happen. He forgot about his own guard and threw himself forward. The distance was too far for him to grab Deco but he managed to swipe the man’s leg out from under him. Deco jerked up his arms and shot into the ceiling, then fell over. Then somebody gasped behind Cesc. Something heavy fell on his feet and he instinctively jerked them away, then curled around to see.

His guard was lying on the ground, staring at Cesc. It took a second for Cesc to realize what that dead stare meant—he was, well, _dead_. And looking at Cesc. More than a little freaked out, Cesc whipped around and just in time: Deco was back on his feet and firing across the room. Cesc looked over and glimpsed Silva running between two statues, a gun in either hand.

Then he looked back at Deco and found the other man had noticed him. He yelped and flipped stupidly onto his back. Then he shoved himself up on his arms and tried to scoot himself away, but Deco was taking aim at him.

A bit of floor between the two of them suddenly exploded into chips and Deco jumped back. Cesc took the opportunity to get onto his feet. He looked wildly around, spotted a big carved figure of a knight sticking out of the wall and ran for it.

“No! No, don’t, they move—” shouted Villa.

Too late Cesc saw that the knight’s arms were lifting its ax. He tried to stop, but his feet skidded and he hit the knight’s legs. He lost his balance and grabbed one of the knight’s knees to steady himself, then cursed and pushed himself away. But he was too slow—he could see the ax rushing down on him.

Somebody grabbed him and hauled him away, just as the ax-head smashed itself to bits on the ground. Cesc gasped in relief. “Oh, my God, thank you so—”

“Shut up and stop running around,” Ballack snapped.

Then he put Cesc down and _Robin_ popped up behind him. Robin seized Cesc’s arm and dragged them behind a pile of crumbled rock. Ballack crouched in front of them, occasionally taking shots at something.

“You’re okay!” There wasn’t room to hug so Cesc rumpled his hand over the top of Robin’s head as hard as he could. “Where have you been? When’d you come in? Oh, hey, Ballack, don’t shoot the—”

“I’m just aiming at Deco,” Ballack snarled. “Tell your friends he’s mine.”

Cesc blinked. “Um, so…you’re on our side now?”

Robin sighed and cuffed Cesc on the shoulder. Then they both ducked a stray bullet. “We got lost but heard noises down here,” Robin muttered, pushing himself back up. “Took a while to figure out how to get in, so we heard Deco threatening this Figo guy and Guardiola, and then we came in about when it all went crazy. Who’re the other two?”

“David Villa and David Silva. They’re with Figo—hey! Hey, Silva! Villa! Listen, I’ve got Robin and Ballack over here, so don’t shoot—”

Ballack put back his hand and pushed Cesc’s head down without even looking. Then he shifted up on one knee and shot at somebody running along the far wall. “No, I don’t want that stupid thing now. If I want to rule the world, it’d be easier to just do it with money and guns like everybody else. I just want to get out of this crazy place and to kill Deco, now shut up so I can do that.”

“Okay, okay, geez. I’m just trying to help,” Cesc muttered. He risked a peek and spotted Villa crouching behind an altar about ten meters to their left. He gestured so Villa saw him and Villa nodded, then pointed behind him. That was where Silva was, Cesc guessed. Then Cesc remembered Guardiola and hissed to himself. “Robin? Robin, what’s going on at the sarcophagus? Can you see Pep or Figo?”

Robin glanced at Cesc, then got low on his belly and edged out onto the other side of the pile. He stared out while everybody took potshots at each other. “I don’t see…well, nobody’s sticking out of the sarcophagus—I don’t know what Figo looks like, okay? Guardiola’s on the floor by the sarcophagus. He…I think someone hit him.”

“ _What_?” Cesc immediately scrambled on top of Robin. He ignored the other man’s protests and barely noticed when Robin pulled him away from a shot that cracked the floor by their hands. “Where? How bad is it?”

“I don’t know,” Robin said after a long moment.

By then Cesc could see. Guardiola was lying on his side, his head pointed towards them. He looked like he’d curled his knees towards his chest but he wasn’t moving. Cesc felt like he’d just fallen into that icy river again. “We have to get him!” he hissed.

“Stay put,” Ballack said. Then he ducked back and actually reached across Robin to touch Cesc’s shoulder. “You have to. I don’t know where Deco is. He’ll shoot you.”

“You don’t care whether or not he shoots me,” Cesc snapped. He curled his hands into fists under him. “Hell, if he shoots me, maybe you’ll get a shot at him.”

Robin started to say something but Ballack cut him off with a sharp gesture. Then he grabbed Cesc’s shirt and pulled Cesc towards him. “Listen. Deco is not shooting you. He doesn’t get one damn thing his way after tricking me like that. And you can’t help your friend if you’re dead.”

“So then what? Because I’m not letting Pep just—”

“He’s moving,” Robin hissed. He shoved Ballack’s hand off Cesc and then pulled Cesc back over. “He’s crawling towards the sarcophagus.”

Guardiola was. He was dragging one leg behind him and leaving a worryingly wide swath of blood on the floor, but at least he was moving. In fact, he’d gotten himself nearly up to the sarcophagus at the foot-end of it, and was stretching out his hand towards one of the dragons that decorated it.

Cesc remembered what Guardiola had told Figo about not touching those. He sucked in a breath, then opened his mouth to call out.

A brilliant blue-white light suddenly streamed up from the sarcophagus. It was beautiful but somehow menacing, and it made everybody freeze. A hush fell, the kind of silence that came just before something huge happened.

Somebody moved in that light. They weren’t much more than a flicker of a shadow, but Cesc could make out them sitting up, and then getting onto their feet. Then they turned around and he knew they were going to jump out. He hissed and his gaze dropped to the floor, where he saw Guardiola picking up something: a small gold box.

Then he jerked his head up. The light parted, and the figure stepped out of it.

* * *

For some reason Luís didn’t crunch his shoulder on bones and metal and rock. In fact he didn’t even realize that he had landed till he tried to sit up, and found out that he could do so. He also found out that he still had the sword in his hand, except now it didn’t look like it’d been lying in a cave for centuries. It was free of rust, the gleam of its edges speaking to how sharp it was.

After another moment, Luís got to his feet. Then he took a look around. He was in another chamber, about the size of a decent office. He looked up and he saw a ceiling with no hole in it. He looked around again—despite the lack of any obvious source of light, he could see perfectly fine—and spotted a table against the far wall. It had things on it and when he moved closer, he could see that they were scabbards: three of them, one of gold, one of iron and one of silk.

Luís held the sword over each and it looked like they’d fit it. He put the sword down and stared at them. This obviously was some sort of riddle. Shakespeare had used a similar device in one of his plays, and it’d also shown up in a lot of folktales…you picked one to get some sort of prize, if he remembered correctly. Which was interesting but frankly, too contrived. And irrelevant, when he just wanted to get out and back into the tomb. He went back to the center of the room and looked at the ceiling. It wasn’t that high, only half a meter or so above his head.

He swung the sword at it.

The tip of the sword went into the ceiling without meeting any resistance. Then things went blurry and white. Luís shut his eyes and threw his arm over them to avoid being blinded, and felt a violent shift that made him fall over. He jerked down his arm and it hit something.

He opened his eyes and found himself staring at the side of a grinning skull. Disgusted, Luís threw himself back and hit something behind him. He was back in the casket.

Some sort of fog had filled up the place. At first Luís thought it was from the flare Villa had set off, but then he realized he wasn’t coughing. Anyway, what was causing it didn’t matter so much as that he couldn’t see through it and he needed to know what had happened to Pep. He grabbed the edge of the sarcophagus and pulled himself up, then got to his feet and onto the edge of the casket. He paused, trying to remember just how far out the carving on it had jutted, and then just jumped as far forward as he could.

Luís went from whitish mist to a dim room. The sharp change made it almost impossible for him to see and he instinctively dropped into a crouch, squinting to speed up his eyes’ adjustment. Then he started and almost stabbed out with the sword at a touch to his arm before he recognized Pep’s convulsive grip. He lowered the sword just in time to keep Pep from impaling himself on it as he threw his arms around Luís, burying his face in Luís’ neck.

The force of it threw Luís off his feet and he had to drop the sword so he could keep the both of them from falling over. “Where’s De—” he started, and then he heard the sob against his throat. “Pep? Pep, I’m…well, intact. Now listen, did you kill Deco or…”

Pep slowly lifted his head. He was crying, his eyes already reddening, but he started to grin as he ran his fingers over Luís’ cheek. By the time he got both hands up around Luís’ face, his eyes were utterly incandescent with joy. He grabbed Luís’ head and kissed Luís soundly, then peeled himself back, still grinning. “My God. You would be the one to do it, and I didn’t even have to tell you how.”

“I don’t think he’s here anymore,” somebody else said.

Luís looked up and Pep abruptly slumped in his arms. He started and looked down, but Pep was already out.

* * *

Apparently while Luís had been in that bizarre room, Deco had sneaked out without anyone noticing. Ballack wanted to go after him but finally gave that up when everybody else made it damn clear that he’d have to do it by himself, and they weren’t going to show him how to get out if he did. He kept muttering that he had first dibs on Deco so Luís let him take the lead alongside Cesc, who swore that he remembered how Pep had led them in.

Pep was…he’d been better. If they got him to proper medical treatment, he’d be fine but for the moment, the blood loss had him drifting in and out of consciousness. Luís bandaged up the man’s leg as best he could and gave the box and the sword, which was rusty again, to Cesc to carry. Then he slung Pep over his shoulder and got them moving.

It took too long to get out, but they didn’t run into Deco and Cesc did successfully show them the way. As soon as they emerged, Albelda ran over with one arm back towards the outside entrance. “Thank fuck you’re back up, because he—”

“Not now. We’re leaving,” Luís snapped. “How long will that take?”

Albelda blinked, looked at Luís and then sensibly decided to shut up about Quique. “We were just waiting for you. It’s me, Quique and Joaquín left, and Pablo’s circling overhead in the chopper. We’ve got a problem—they sent up fucking reinforcements. This chopper showed up out of nowhere. We grounded it, but not before it dropped off a new load.”

“Well, we’re leaving.” Luís could hear the shooting outside now. He bent and set down Pep as gently as he could, then went up to the entrance to see how things were. “Call Pablo.”

Outside, at the edge of the cliff, Quique and Joaquín had piled up rocks and duffel bags to make shields. They crouched behind them and occasionally popped up to let off a round of bullets down the cliffside, but they were clearly just covering their positions. Luís whistled and Quique turned around, then said something to Joaquín. Then he ran over, keeping himself in a low hunch. “Another ten minutes and they’ll be up here.”

“Well, we won’t be here by then. I just told Albelda to call the chopper around,” Luís said.

Just then Albelda came up. He gave Quique a sour look but addressed Luís civilly enough. “Pablo says he’ll be back in a minute. He’ll rake the cliff first to get their heads down, then come down so we can jump in instead of climbing the ropes.”

“He doesn’t have anybody in there with him. Who’s going to keep them from shooting the fuel tanks while we’re doing that?” Quique said.

Albelda opened his mouth but Luís cut him off. “We’ll have to chance it. We’ve injured who can’t climb.”

“Well, fine,” Quique said curtly, after a moment’s stare at Luís. “David, don’t just stand there. Get your ass outside and help Joaquín.”

“Hypocritical son of a bitch.” But Albelda ran out there. He ducked behind Quique’s barrier and fiddled with his rifle.

Quique glanced over his shoulder as the other man left. His mouth twitched. Then he snorted and looked back at Luís. “And this is why you wanted me. David’s going to love that.”

“Just why do you two do this? Don’t you have better things to waste your time and energy on?” Luís snapped.

“It’s not a waste, Luís. Not when it’s him,” Quique said in an oddly mild tone. He stepped to the side, where they’d stacked some spare equipment, and started rummaging around in it. “Well, call when it’s time.”

After another look at him, Luís spun on his heel and went back to the others. He briefed them on the plan. Then Ballack and Silva went off to help keep their attackers’ heads down; Villa stayed back as it turned out he’d probably dislocated an arm during the fight with Deco. He and Silva had already put it back in but he said he couldn’t move that arm too much, so Luís had him bundle the sword and the box into a bag for easier carrying.

Luís checked Pep over and then they ran out of time as the helicopter came roaring up. Robin helped Luís run Pep out into the copter, with Cesc and Villa on their heels. They all made it safely on before Pablo had to temporarily pull back when a shot cracked the windshield. Villa hung out one side of the copter with a gun and forced their attackers back, and Pablo swung back to pick up the rest of them.

Ballack tossed Silva in before jumping easily across the space. He’d barely gotten out of the way before Joaquín hurled himself inside. Albelda followed in short order. By then the copter had gotten very crowded.

“Move, move, goddamn it, move your ass,” Albelda snapped, shoving at Silva. When Silva snapped back, Albelda just snarled. “That fucking son of a whore needs the room. Slow bastard—Pablo! What are you doing? Quique’s still there!”

Luís grabbed Albelda’s arm as Albelda tried to storm the cockpit. “Sit down. I told him to and he has to lift off—I just saw a rocket launcher down there.”

“But Quique—” Then Albelda threw himself to the other side. He nearly fell out of the copter looking. “What the—what the _hell_ does he think he’s doing?”

“He’s jumping off the cliff at them!” Villa yelped.

Albelda let out a high, inhuman noise, then did try to fall out. Villa started and stared at him; Joaquín and Silva were faster and each grabbed a shoulder, holding Albelda back. He struggled and fought till they forced him to the floor, and even then he was screaming filthy curses. Joaquín blanketed him until the rocket had missed them—and missed the tower too, judging by Cesc’s exclamation—and then got off.

The moment he did, Albelda was up like a spring. His furious gaze immediately fixed itself on Luís. “ _That’s_ the Madrid method? Fucking suicide? You goddamn son of a bitch, you—you asked him for _that_ and he did—”

“God no,” Luís said, glancing over the edge. Then he reached over and pulled the lever that’d start winding up the rappel rope he’d thrown out while the others had been coming in.

Albelda sucked in a breath. He was over by Luís before he’d exhaled, staring down at the grim-faced man just barely dangling onto the rope’s end. A funny half-laugh, half-gasp came out of him. He slumped against the floor for a few seconds. Then he was up and helping to haul Quique into the copter.

Once Quique was solidly inside, Albelda took the man by the shoulders. “You motherfucking—”

There was a click and then a horrendous boom down below. The copter wasn’t quite out of range and was blown roughly sideways by the explosion; the engines screamed as Pablo forced the helicopter to climb. Luís yanked Pep up between his legs and then locked one arm around the man’s waist for good measure.

Eventually things leveled out, and Pablo called back that they could shut the doors if they didn’t want the chill. Ballack and Silva laughed, but Albelda was still staring at Quique.

“You missed the tower. I think that that’s okay. But you wiped out half our camp,” Cesc said, looking outside.

“Well, hope you didn’t have anything important there.” Quique uncurled his hand from the remote trigger and tossed that into a corner. Then he looked at Albelda. “What, miss me?”

Albelda socked him. Then, while Quique was still lying there with a bloody mouth, Albelda crawled over him and kissed him hard, with hands knotting in hair and the works. Villa made strangled noises before scrambling into the cockpit, while Silva whooped it up and Joaquín cackled.

“How’s Pep?” Cesc asked. “Is he going to be okay?”

“He should—” Luís started. Then he looked down, loosening his hold on the man a little.

Pep nuzzled Luís’ neck before retaking his grip on Luís’ shirt. “Did you remember to bring them?” he asked in a raspy whisper.

“Cesc’s got them,” Luís said. “Stop moving. We’ll be with a doctor in a half-hour.”

“Did you see them? The three scabbards?” Pep said. He tugged at Luís’ shirt when Luís didn’t immediately answer. “Did you?”

Luís let his head fall back against the wall. “Pep. I am not answering your damn questions till you get a doctor.”

“I’m _fine_. Did you—”

“I am not a control freak. I’m careful about how I do my job, and you were a job. But now you’re not, and I’m not used to worrying about people as opposed to job details, and it’s _very_ hard,” Luís said, moving his head so he could look Pep in the eye. He kept it up till Pep flushed and looked away. “So would you please just wait half an hour?”

Pep mumbled something and pushed his face back into Luís’ neck. His hand twisted idly in Luís’ shirt so a button came off.

“So,” Ballack said conversationally. The doors were shut so the roar of the blades wasn’t so bad now, but he still had to talk so everyone knew he was talking to Robin. “What are you doing after this?”

Robin blinked hard. “You’re a confident son of a bitch. Who kidnapped us and threatened to torture Cesc.”

“I’m a confident son of a bitch with enough miles to get you anywhere in the world first class. And I un-kidnapped you and kept Deco from shooting your friend,” Ballack pointed out.

Cesc coughed. “I don’t think you can really ‘unkidnap’ people.”

Robin didn’t appear to be listening to his friend. He was still staring at Ballack, but with a sort of intrigued horror. Next to him Albelda and Quique were well into a serious making-out session. That made a lot more sense of the two of them, to be honest.

“Luís,” Pep murmured, his lips grazing Luís’ throat. “Luís. When we land, and I get a doctor—we’re having that goddamn argument about telling me things. Because if you don’t, then I don’t know when you actually know things and when I’m wrong, and you don’t know when I’m not being whiny and I’m just concerned that—”

“All right, all right. In a half-hour.” After a moment Luís took his head off the wall and turned it just enough to brush his mouth over Pep’s forehead. Then he put his head back and closed his eyes. He was tired.

* * *

Landing was, if possible, even more exhausting than dealing with a strung-out Deco and a magical tomb. The kids of course were thrilled to all be united and had to bounce around patting each other, and then they were even more hysterical when they saw how Pep was. Luís almost had to hit them to get them away long enough to get Pep onto the plane. Pep would need to get to a hospital to make sure he healed properly, but right now they just needed to get some blood in him and wrap up his leg.

“Zinedine had a feeling you’d need some,” Morientes shrugged as he set up the IV line.

But Zinedine didn’t know that it’d be Pep who’d need it. Unless…Luís started to check the bags in the cooler, then stopped. He didn’t actually want to know if Zinedine had stocked all of their blood types. Or how the hell the man had known what those were.

“Mori!” Villa swung his head into the room and squinted at them. “Raúl’s on the line. Wants to know if you took the fifty-millimeter with you.”

“Oh.” Morientes took a step before he noticed Luís’ look. He stopped, frowned, and then remembered he needed to finish hooking the blood-bag onto the stand. “I’ll be over in five seconds, okay?” he said, doing that.

The other man nodded and disappeared. Luís mentally breathed a sigh of relief. “You two straightened things out?”

“Oh, yeah, we talked and it’s fine,” Morientes said, ducking his head. He scratched at his eyebrow. “You were—you had some good points. We both thought so. Listen, can I—”

“Just send in Silva for Pep’s leg,” Luís said, waving the other man away.

Beaming, Morientes skipped through the dividing curtain. He was shouting to Villa not to give away their plan to surprise Raúl with tickets to El Clásico before he was halfway down the aisle. One less worry for Luís, then.

There was a tug at Luís’ sleeve. He looked down, then reached out. Pep batted away his hand and kept pushing himself up, and finally Luís just helped the man sit. Somewhere along the line Pep got hold of Luís’ arm. “Listen. Those scabbards,” Pep said. “What did you do with them? Did you take the silk one?”

“No. No, I just left them. I was a little too busy trying to make sure Deco hadn’t shot you to go shopping,” Luís said. He put his free hand behind him, then leaned against the wall. “Anyway, you hadn’t told me if I could touch them or not.”

Pep didn’t laugh. He walked his hand up Luís’ arm to the elbow, then tugged himself over so he could sling his arm around Luís’ neck. Then he looked Luís hard in the eye. “You _weren’t_ listening to me. When I was telling you about the legend of El Siete back in your friend’s kitchen.”

“I had to tell Zizou whether or not we needed bazookas! If you just let him do all the ordering, you end up with a small country’s arsenal!” Luís protested. He put his hand against Pep’s chest. “Look, I’m sorry. But once you get home, you can round up whoever you need and go back, and get the—”

“No. No, no, no, absolutely not. Those scabbards need to stay put,” Pep said. He pursed his lips, trying to make up his mind. Then his shoulders dropped. He pulled his arm off Luís’ neck, but put up his other one so he was holding Luís by both shoulders. “The legend says—El Siete made a deal with a demon for his power. He would unite the country under his rule, he would always win in war, and he would marry the most beautiful woman in the world. That’s gold, iron and silk. The scabbards are what have power, not the sword. The sword’s just a tool.”

Luís shrugged. “Well, all right. Sounds like a decent bargain.”

“Not really. El Siete became king and married, but his wife raised a rebellion against him. He didn’t know it was her till he’d killed her in battle, and then he couldn’t stop killing. In the end his best knight entered the priesthood, then went and fought him. He blessed El Siete while they were fighting and finally lifted the curse, but not before El Siete killed him too.” Pep slid his hands down a little. He pinched folds of Luís’ shirt between his fingers. “If you’d picked up any of those scabbards, you would’ve gained that power but you would’ve been under the same curse.”

“Thank God I didn’t pick up the silk one, in that case,” Luís said. He put his hand to Pep’s side, then took it away as he turned towards the curtain. He heard Silva coming. “I didn’t know what they meant, but I didn’t have the time to figure that out. I needed to get back to you and I figured I’d just try seeing if I could do that without fiddling around with them.”

Pep’s grip tightened. “You didn’t think about getting them for Deco, or for—or to have an edge over him?”

“Look, Pep, I—” Luís looked back, saw the intensity of Pep’s stare and sighed “—yes. I thought about it. But trying to figure out what they meant would’ve taken too long, and I wanted to get back to you. I’ve known Deco for a while and I’ve managed him before, without any supernatural help—and if he’d shot you because I’d fallen in, I wouldn’t have needed a goddamn scabbard to deal with him. I needed to know how you were before I went any further.”

For a moment Pep looked like he was going to—then he took a deep breath while dropping his head. When he lifted it, his eyes were clear and dry. “Well, then, we don’t have to worry about the scabbards, or the curse. The rest of the legend goes that El Siete was so grief-stricken he had himself buried with them, so they wouldn’t be misused. Because the demon told him that the scabbards and their curse would stay until a virtuous man took the sword from him but refused the scabbards.”

“‘Virtuous’?” Luís repeated, snorting.

Pep grinned too. Then he abruptly looked down. He smoothed his hands up and down Luís’ chest. “Luís. Listen.”

Luís attentively cocked his head. He might have been a little exaggerated about it.

Of course Pep didn’t miss that. His mouth quirked and he smacked Luís lightly on the shoulder. Then he rubbed at the spot, his eyes turning serious again. He looked at Luís the same way he had when he’d told Luís he wouldn’t lie any more. “Luís, I…I have some problems with your profession but I’d like…I don’t think they’re anything I can’t hear you out on. I’d like you to—”

“Hey,” Silva said, strolling in. He grinned expansively at Pep’s start and glower. “Ready and waiting to deal with that leg.”

“Well, knock yourself out,” Luís said. He put his hands in his pockets but let Pep hang onto him. “How are things out front?”

Silva rummaged around in the medical supplies. “Oh, right. Actually you need to go out there. Quique wants you.”

“If it’s about Albelda already, you can just tranq them both and we’ll ship them home,” Luís muttered. 

With Silva laughing in the background, Luís turned to Pep. He gave Pep a moment and then gently leaned back. Pep tightened his hand in Luís’ shirt, then grimaced and let go. He sat back with his eyes still fixed on Luís. “You’re coming back, right?”

“Right,” Luís said. He half-turned, then looked back. He scratched at the side of his neck. “You don’t lie, I don’t lie. I don’t really see the point, anyway—you seem to pick up things too quick for it.”

“Thanks, Luís,” Pep said, visibly relieved. He glanced at Silva, who’d started cutting off his trouser-leg. His shoulder tensed, but then he took a deep breath. He looked back at Pep and smiled. “Truly. Thank you. For—”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Luís replied, already walking away.

He went out and didn’t see Quique in the main part of the plane, so he came out of the plane and stood on the top of the boarding stairs. A movement caught his eye and he spotted Quique waving from across the airfield, next to one of the helicopters. Luís frowned and glanced over his shoulder, even though he knew nobody was standing there. He flexed his fingers inside his pockets, then took them out, sighing. Then he headed down the stairs.

When Luís got to him, Quique was already yelling directions at Pablo. “There’s an army coming,” Quique explained, leaning back out of the copter. “This Wenger, who heads up the archaeological team? He caught a ride on some villager’s donkey, got to a phone and called up the military. We’ve got to go.”

“Silva’s still in the plane.” Luís went around Quique and climbed into the copter. He saw his bag had already been transferred and sat down next to it.

“He knows. He’s going to do up Guardiola’s leg and then get the hell out. Mori and Villa are giving him a lift,” Quique said. He glanced at Luís. “He’s not going to give Guardiola anything. We figured you wouldn’t go for that.”

Luís shook his head as he leaned over his bag. He got it open and then dug around for his phone. “How close is Wenger?”

“An hour or so. Mori, Villa and Silva are going to hang around long enough to make sure they show, just in case somebody made it out of that mountain. I don’t think so, but Mori insisted.” Quique looked grumpy about that. He clambered into the copter and then reached back to pull in Albelda, who’d come up while he and Luís had been talking. “When you use the Madrid method, there are no survivors.”

Albelda snorted. “Aren’t you a survivor? And us?”

Thankfully, Luís had reception out here. As the other two began to bicker, Luís dialed up Zinedine.

* * *

“I think he left a while ago,” Cesc said slowly. He couldn’t really meet Pep’s eyes. “Sorry. Nobody really noticed—they said they had to return the copters and that made sense, but we were all so excited when we heard the boss was okay that—”

“No. No, it’s all right.” The way Pep laid back down, it wasn’t all right but Pep cut Cesc off when Cesc tried to apologize again. “It’s not your fault. It’s all right, Cesc. Really. I’m fine, and I’m glad…I’m just glad that everyone’s all right, at the end of the day.”

Cesc bit his lip. He tried to think of something else to say, but nothing he could think of seemed right. It wasn’t like he could even say Pep would be better off this way—not when Pep was staring listlessly at the ceiling like that. He’d never even seen Pep look that discouraged.

In the end, Cesc just muttered that they’d called Xavi and he’d promised to be up as quick as he can. Pep grunted and kept staring, and Cesc ducked out of the room. He went a couple steps, thinking nasty thoughts about Figo. Then he bumped into somebody.

“Hey,” Robin said when Cesc had looked up. His brows were up. “You look depressed for somebody who’s been through the shit we’ve been through and still has his dissertation topic.”

“Yeah, well, I just think Figo’s a dick,” Cesc muttered. But he couldn’t help a smile: they had done pretty awesome, after all. He looked around and then shrugged and took a seat. Then he found himself yawning. “My God, I’m exhausted.”

Robin got into the seat across the aisle from Cesc. “Yeah.”

He put his head back, and after a moment, Cesc did the same. It was nice and quiet inside the plane and somehow Cesc’s eyes fluttered shut. He shifted a couple times, his bruises getting at him, but he was more tired than hurt. Man, was he tired, he thought as he drifted off.

* * *

_Three Months Later_

Luís took off his sunglasses as he walked up the steps. He clipped them on his shirt and paid for a ticket, then put them back on. A guard directed him to go out the back door and across a courtyard, and then take a left. Apparently there’d be a sign to show him the rest of the way.

There wasn’t, but as it turned out Luís didn’t need one. He went into one of the halls branching off the courtyard, paused to take off his sunglasses again, and then ambled past a glass case with an ugly stone sculpture in it. Then he turned into the first exhibition room. It seemed to be a work in progress, since near the far end, a small group of people were trying to lifting a long, metal-framed glass box onto a pedestal. Xavi was one of them, Luís noted.

“Careful, careful,” Pep said, illustrating his point with wild arm-swings. He watched anxiously as his team puffed and heaved and finally got the box down. “Okay. Okay. Wait. It’s crooked. Move that—no, the other—no, _you_ hold still and you move.”

As they tried to obey that, one of the people on the box spotted Luís. The man stood back from the box, to the dismay of the others holding it, and then jogged around its end. “Hey. Hey, listen, I’m sorry but you can’t come in—”

There was a blur in between him and Luís, and then Luís had a staggering armful. Pep wrapped his legs around Luís’ waist and grabbed Luís’ head in both hands; Luís reflexively seized Pep’s waist. He stumbled back and Pep hitched up with the motion, staring down at Luís with joyful disbelief.

“Hi,” Luís grunted. He took another backwards step and semi-regained his balance. “Sorry I’m late.”

Pep inhaled sharply. “You said—”

“But I didn’t say _when_ ,” Luís pointed out.

Pep’s eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth and Luís braced himself. But then Pep shook his head. A grin cracked away his irritation and he let out a long peal of laughter. He shook Luís’ head hard, then dove in and kissed Luís while Luís’ teeth rattled.

“No, no, it’s okay,” Luís heard Xavi saying somewhere in the background. “No, seriously, Gerard. That’s the guy who helped Pep save all this stuff.”

“That’s him?” It was the man who’d tried to tell Luís to get out. “Huh. He’s…I don’t know, I thought he’d be taller.”

Thankfully, Pep let Luís breathe at that point, and that was more important than straightening out the man’s idiot assistant. Luís got one hand under Pep’s left leg to hold him better, then shifted his grip when he saw the flinch. “Sorry. How’s your arm?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Just a little sore still, but—” Pep stiffened, then leaned back “—where _were_ you? Luís, damn it, when I say you need to tell me things, I don’t just mean when I ask—”

“Look, I had to tidy up some things or else I wouldn’t be able to stick around now, all right? I’m sorry I had to leave like that, but your colleague had the _army_ show up. That would’ve been a little bit of a problem for me,” Luís said. He hefted Pep again, then blew out his breath slowly. As lean as Pep was, he still made for more than a handful. Luís’ arms and back were starting to hurt. “And I wanted to check on Deco. After all the trouble I went through, I didn’t want to show up and then have to do it again.”

Pep listened and then loosened up his death-grip on Luís’ hair and ears. He rested his arms on Luís’ shoulders. “Oh. Wait, so Deco made it out? We didn’t find him in there—granted, we’ve only looked into about ten percent of the place so far, but—”

“I don’t know either, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s coming after us for that. I made sure,” Luís said. He eased Pep down onto his feet, then dropped his arms.

“‘Us?” Pep asked after a moment, looking hard at Luís. He didn’t drop his arms.

“Yes, I’ve decided to retire from my job and ask you out to Catalan poetry readings,” Luís said. He shrugged as best he could when Pep was basically hanging off his neck. “You did offer.”

Pep snorted. He let his arms slide so he could clasp his hands over the back of Luís’ neck. His eyes were bright and wet. “You’re staying,” he said.

“Ye—”

After a moment, Luís put his hands back on Pep’s waist. Then he moved one arm up to wrap around Pep’s shoulders, and put his other hand on the small of Pep’s waist. He closed his eyes and kissed the man back.

“Well,” Pep said when they broke apart. He finally seemed to remember the others and glanced sharply over his shoulder; his assistants cheered and he turned back with a flush starting up his face. “Well, all right. But there’s no reading tonight. Anyway, I have to finish this up and then help a friend with her project.”

“All right. I don’t mind museums either.” Luís noticed Xavi gesturing frantically behind Pep and frowned, trying to make out what the other man wanted. “What’s the other one on?”

“Oh, we’re not that sure yet. She just got a shipment that’s supposedly from a colleague in South America, but it’s been hard to contact them and we don’t know what’s in the shipment,” Pep said. He didn’t seem that worried about it. “It’s probably going to take a while—oh, and you might not be able to come. We’re doing it under tight security.”

Xavi was telling Luís to take Pep and run, Luís finally figured out. Then he looked back at Pep, belatedly hearing the other man. “Why? Is it dangerous?”

“Probably not. The dig’s in a remote area and communication’s always been spotty. It’s just that the last time we got an unknown shipment, there was a bit of a disaster.” Pep started looking like he wanted to lie, but he held his chin up and kept his eyes on Luís’ face. “This monster was inside and it attacked people, and it was a while before we got it under control. But that’s extremely unusu—Luís! Luís, what are you—”

Luís felt Pep seize the bottom of his suit-jacket and resigned himself to another ruined suit. He turned around, Pep slung over his shoulder, and headed straight for the exit. “We’re leaving. I just got here. I’m not running around saving you again until _at least_ tomorrow.”

“Luís, put me down. I have—Luís! I have work to do!”

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it!” Xavi called after them. He was trying and failing to sound professional instead of gleeful. “And I’ll tell them something came up! It’s okay, Puyi and I can handle the shipment! We like monsters!”

Pep exhaled disbelievingly into Luís’ back. He didn’t kick but he did move his hands around a lot on Luís’ back, legs and arms. A couple times he reached around front and nearly did something indecent. “Put me down, Luís.”

“Pep, when I put you down, I’m going to fuck you. I’ve been thinking about that for three straight months and believe me, I intend to make good on all those thoughts,” Luís said. He listened to Pep’s strangled, not entirely protesting exclamations. “So where do you want me to put you down?”

For a moment Pep was quiet and just hung off Luís’ shoulder. Then he pointed. “My office is that way. There’s a good lock on the door and I have a couch.”

“Ah. Thank you.” Luís happily followed the man’s directions.

* * *

“Their security’s not that good. I could do it,” Deco said. He shifted restlessly on the car seat, juggling his laptop and his bottle of water.

The man sitting next to him nodded slowly, looking out the window. Then he put his arm across Deco when Deco moved again. “I know but it’d be pointless. There’s nothing worth taking.”

Deco opened his mouth.

“And your pride isn’t a good reason.” Mourinho looked at him, then leaned forward. “I know why you want to do it,” he said. “You should feel that way. They put you through hell. But this fight’s over, Deco. You’re too good to waste your time on it. Look towards the next one, and then you can buy your way into heaven, and pay for them to see hell. Now, let’s go. We have a plane to catch.”

Then Mourinho tapped the driver on the shoulder. Cristiano glanced back, nodded, and started up the car. They peeled away from the museum and slid seamlessly into the passing traffic. In a matter of moments they were gone.

**Author's Note:**

> The legend here is completely made-up and not based on any actual legend/myth.
> 
> I love cheesy summer action movies, I really do, and that is why I tried to mock as many of them as possible here.
> 
> Originally written in 2010.


End file.
